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

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

Recipe for Success was an outgrowth of REF's successful and continuing Give Back, Give Books program, through which more than 22,000 new books have been donated to city school students and city school libraries. Recipe for Success continued the mission of Give Back, Give Books by offering cookbooks to students. The program used cookbooks and other activities to encourage learning about healthy eating, nutrition and, for seventh-grade students, careers in food-related businesses.

At the elementary schools, the program engaged educators, chefs, pediatricians and the Public Market in helping to create a curriculum for third graders which included lessons about healthy eating and healthy food preparation. This curriculum is posted on our website.

Teachers 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 prepared healthy food and learned about the importance of nutritious eating and cooking.

Students in Wilson Foundation's 7th grade health classes learned about healthy eating and healthy foods through the program. Sixty of them attended a field trip to the University of Rochester's Food Service which involved 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 was 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.