Trained and Licensed Community Health Workers are needed to help with these distributions on a part-time, contractual basis to assist with Brighter Bites distributions in Houston. Job Details: $15/hour Contract, part-time (up to 20 hrs/week during seasons) Seasonal — Summer: June-July; Fall: September-November; Spring: February-April Must be able to travel independently to school sites around the Houston area (mileage reimbursable) Bilingual (Spanish/English) candidates encouraged to apply! Send resume to careers@brighterbites.org Deadline to apply Tuesday January 20, 2015
News Type: Program Highlights
I’m Dreaming of a Bright Christmas
Whenever one of our schools asks us to participate in something a little extra, we jump at the opportunity! We love helping our families in any way we can. This week we collaborated with the Houston Food Bank and Sherman Elementary to make its students’ holidays a little brighter. Not only did they receive new books and toys that a community partner provided, but they also received school supplies, recipes, apples, oranges, and peanut butter! As a bonus, we got a sneak peek of a school’s Jingle Jam Talent Show! This week as been filled with one holiday event after another and we couldn’t be more joyful this Christmas season.
Crafting Careers at C.F. Carr Elementary
We love spreading the word about nutrition! That’s why it was such a huge honor to speak at career day at C.F. Carr Elementary School. We talked to the kiddos about working for Brighter Bites as dietitians before we taught them the sweet specifics about sugar in drinks! 
We enjoyed sharing how rewarding it is to be on the Brighter Bites team! It’s so much fun cooking up scrumptious samples and working with our extraordinary volunteers every week. Talking to the kids about fruits and veggies is especially rewarding too! Maybe even our favorite part! The newfound muscles we have from lifting 50 pound bags of cabbage aren’t bad either. They sure impressed the kids! At the end of the day, we taught a lesson about sugary beverages. After some quick measuring, the kids were shocked to see how much sugar was in some of their favorite drinks! We used this opportunity to talk about making healthier choices with Brighter Bites produce and even shared a smoothie recipe that the kids could make at home! We really enjoyed spending time with the kiddos at C.F. Carr and can’t wait to see them again in the spring! 
We Foresee a Flourishing Future
The future is upon us! Brighter Bites continues to bloom. In a few short years, we grew from an idea into a program serving thousands of families weekly. Today we met with the Brighter Bites visionaries, Lisa and Shreela, to prepare for more growth. We don’t want to let the cat out of the bag yet; so, suffice it to say we’re planting the seeds for several very exciting new opportunities. The horizon looks brighter and brighter with every partnership we make. Stay tuned for more details! 
Dallas is Done!
Wow! The semester flies by when you’re working with wonderful schools, families, and fresh produce! During the eight weeks, we brought healthier choices and fun food experiences to our families. One mother of three and a weekly volunteer at John Q. Adams Elementary, Elizabeth Salazar, absolutely loved Brighter Bites and the positive influence it had on her family! 
Elizabeth and her family Our mission is to feed with impact by providing access to fresh produce and increasing food literacy with fun and informative nutrition education materials. Elizabeth used the 30 pounds of produce, donated by the North Texas Food Bank, to make delicious and healthful meals for her family. She said “with the fresh produce I receive, I can cook for my whole family and everybody is happy!” Elizabeth was able to stretch her weekly grocery budget to ensure her three growing youngters have healthy meals and full bellies. 
Cheese Stuffed Zucchini that Elizabeth made NTFB and Brighter Bites impacted 1800 families this semester in nine Dallas schools! Each week we distributed 54,000 pounds of fresh produce; that’s a total of 432,000 pounds of freshness, crispiness, crunchiness, and unfiddled around with goodness over the course of the semester! Our amazing mom and volunteer, Elizabeth, said “the program is awesome because it’s nice to help and be helped at the same time!” We can’t wait to get back in the swing of things and bring more color and crunch to our families in the spring of 2015!
It’s a Wrap in Houston
It’s been a whirlwind! The Houston operation doubled in size! We took on more schools than we’ve ever done and served more families than we ever have. We were able to give them even more variety with new items such as persimmons, rutabaga, and kabocha squash. We’ve experimented with new recipes and snacks. And we overhauled our education materials to include more of what you asked for! More recipes, more cooking skills, and more information about keeping your family healthy. 2014 has been a tremendous year of growth for Brighter Bites. None of which would be possible without the wonderful staff of the Houston Food Bank and North Texas Food Bank who made it their mission to get us more produce. We love our warehouse staff who took care to build our pallets and our fun-loving drivers who made sure it was delivered. And we can’t forget about our dedicated volunteers who participated every week at each site. It’s hard work and nobody knows it better than them. Brighter Bites is really a team effort and we’re thankful to have so much support! Thank you all for another great semester! 
Brighter Bites – A Day in the Life!
BRIGHTER BITES – A DAY IN THE LIFE! By Kristin Michalewicz and Jacqueline Noyola As Brighter Bites Coordinators (a North Texas Food Bank Partner Program) we are constantly on the go. Our jobs are rewarding and engaging, and can also be a bit hectic and sometimes force us to get our hands a little dirty! Last week, the Brighter Bites team met for a quick huddle to prepare for the week. We decided to make Crunchy Apple Crisps for families for the week’s healthy snack since it is prime apple season. After buying bags and bags of apples, we headed to NTFB’s amazing Community Kitchen to slice and bake the apples. (We couldn’t possibly give our precious kiddos the snack without a few taste tests ourselves to ensure deliciousness!) We packaged our Crunchy Apple Crisps and the recipe, along with the week’s supplies of nutrition education pieces for each of our nine schools. Then we hit the road. 
Kristin Michalewicz: I headed to a Brighter Bites elementary school in southwest Dallas. Because Brighter Bites is a collaborative, community based program, we work with each of our participating schools to recruit volunteers who help us bag the produce – the volunteers are mainly students’ family members, teachers, and occasionally older elementary students (9 and 10 year olds are crazy fast at bagging produce!). At noon I met Vaughan, the incredible NTFB distribution driver, at the school and he unloaded six pallets of fresh fruits and vegetables – a total of 5,100 pounds for 170 families at that school.
Alicia Farhat (left) Kristin Michalewicz (right) preparing food samples for Brighter Bites families!
As we were in an assembly line bagging the produce into two paper bags per family, I talked to one mom who used last week’s red and green peppers to make stuffed peppers with a delicious mix of ground beef, bread crumbs and seasoning. I was so excited to hear that her kids FIRST ate the green and red peppers, then the stuffing! Jacqueline Noyola: I went to a different elementary school in north east Dallas. While chatting with one volunteer mom, she told me that her elementary aged son has always been interested in food and cooking, and aspires to become a chef one day. Since participating in Brighter Bites this fall, her son has been able to experiment and explore using the fresh fruits and vegetables to create new recipes. He is using the produce as a tool to express his creativity in the kitchen. And hopefully he is charting the course to become a world famous chef! We love our jobs, and we love that we get to spend each day with sweet families who are dedicated to making their kids’ lives brighter by helping to nourish them with healthy, fresh food. At the end of each week we crash, exhausted from moving all that produce, but renewed and energized knowing that we provided brighter choices and brighter outlooks for our 1,800 Brighter Bites families!
Jacqueline Noyola ready to distribute delicious crunchy apple crisps!
Red Bluff Elementary Reports on Brighter Bites
Our little girls and boysenberries made the news! The Pasadena Citizen shared with the community our collaborative effort to brighten the lives of Red Bluff Elementary students and families.
Red Bluff Students taking a Brighter Bite out of life