Food Culture Project Complete!

A volunteer connects an American girl in DC with a Salvadoran mother and son in El SalvadorLearning Life is happy to report that we completed our food culture project today!

Launched in January 2018, the project engaged fifteen lower-income families in Washington DC, USA, San Salvador, El Salvador, and Dakar, Senegal in learning from each other and our project curriculum about food culture and nutrition.

The food project follows on Learning Life’s first international project, completed in 2017, which involved lower-income families in the USA, Senegal and Jordan in learning about community through photos they took, shared and discussed, culminating in a photo album featuring selected photos from their different vantage points in the world.  Click here for results of that project.

This second international project, part of Learning Life’s Family Diplomacy Initiative (FDI), was completed in collaboration with the Georgetown University School of Medicine’s Community Health Division.  That collaboration has thus far resulted in three research conference presentations about the food cultures of some of Learning Life’s families in the USA, El Salvador and Senegal, based on interviews, field observations, and surveys we conducted with them.  You can learn more about that research here and here.Volunteers engage families in world food culture and nutrition learning

By June, we will issue a project report based on pre- and post-project surveys with a subset of eight of the fifteen Learning Life families engaged.  The report will detail the project’s impact on the participating families’ interest in international affairs, tolerance for difference, and knowledge of food culture and nutrition.  Stay tuned for the report!  Also, in the coming months, FDI will be scaling up to engage more families, starting in Spanish, French and English-speaking countries, in world learning from each other plus educational content we provide via Learning Life’s CDI Facebook Group.