Recipe for Success is a community effort to promote literacy, healthy eating, and food-related careers through cooking activities. The program focuses on third, seventh, and ninth graders in the Rochester City School District (RCSD).

During the 2008-2009 school year, Schools 50, 39 and 36, and the Wilson Foundation Academy have participated in Recipe for Success.

Recipe for Success is an outgrowth of Rochester Education Foundation's successful and continuing Give Back, Give Books program, through which more than 18,000 new books have been donated to city school students and city school libraries. Recipe for Success continues the mission of Give Back, Give Books by offering cookbooks to students. The program uses cookbooks and other activities to encourage learning about healthy eating, nutrition and, for seventh-grade students, career in food-related businesses.

At the elementary schools, the program has engaged educators, chefs, pediatricians and the Public Market in helping to create a curriculum for third graders which includes lessons about healthy eating and healthy food preparation. We will post this curriculum on our website when it is completed during the Summer of 2009.

Through the program, teachers this spring have received a small collection of books including a storybook about healthy eating (Good Enough to Eat, a Kids Guide to Food and Nutrition by Lizzy Rockwell), a book about teaching nutrition (Yum, Your Ultimate Manual for Good Nutrition by Daina Kalnins), and a book of 50 recipes (Healthy Cooking for Kids, published by Dorling Kindersley).

Students at School 50 participated in an apple tasting, met pediatricians from the University of Rochester medical center to talk about healthy eating, and learned about portion size and how to read a food label. Students at Schools 39 and 36 will be preparing healthy food and learning about the importance of nutritious eating and cooking.

Students at Wilson Foundation 7th grade health classes also are learning about healthy eating and healthy foods through the program. Sixty of them are attending a field trip to the University of Rochester's Food Service which will involve hearing about a wide range of food-related careers, tasting healthy food and seeing a demonstration about how to prepare healthy food.

Recipe for Success is supported by generous grants from the Greater Rochester Health Foundation, Excellus Blue Cross Blue Shield and Key Bank. American Heart Association also provided valuable in-kind support.