This is both peak harvest season and planting season for ʻulu, or breadfruit, and the Hawaiʻi ʻUlu Cooperative is looking for help to continue a program that provides free sampler boxes of fresh produce to students across the state. However, the program ran out of funds and had to halt.
Through the Hoʻopili ʻAi initiative, local educators could request farm-to-school sampler boxes at no charge to them. The boxes come with locally grown products like ʻuala, kalo, ʻulu and palaʻai, or pumpkin, as well as new items including honey, macadamia nuts, ʻulu flour, pancake mix and animal crackers. The boxes also include educational material about the products and how to prepare them.
Dana Shapiro, the ʻUlu Cooperative's CEO, said the initiative reached nearly 70,000 keiki across the state while putting almost $150,000 into the local agriculture industry last year.
"Teachers are finding that the taste test and hands-on experience with the crop, combined with standards-aligned lesson plans is a really effective way to engage students," Shapiro told HPR. "That way they start making the connection in their minds between our ancestral crops here in Hawaiʻi, along with nutrition, environmental sustainability and all these things that are important to Hawaiʻi."
Last year, the program was funded in part by the Stupski Foundation and the Hawaiʻi SNAP-Ed program under the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa's College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resilience. Through the grants, Hoʻopili ʻAi was able to supply over 800 sampler boxes — nearly triple the reach from its first three years.
Shapiro noted that the sampler boxes allow the students to take home the products along with a recipe to try with their family. She said that she's gotten feedback from parents that this was the first time they had tried some of the products, and now they are staples in their home-cooked meals.
"One of the big reasons why we have such low consumption of our indigenous local crops is that people just are no longer familiar with it," she said. "If they're not introduced to it from a very young age, it becomes harder to introduce it later in life. Starting with our youth in school is a very effective way to build these relationships early on and cultivate a love for our cultural traditions, and the knowledge of Hawaiʻi's incredible agricultural abundance."
Although the program currently can not supply the free sampler boxes due to limited funding, teachers can still purchase sampler boxes for their classrooms or sign up for the waitlist when the free boxes are available again.
Shapiro said they are looking to raise roughly $160,000, which will allow them to expand beyond last year's capacity to reach nearly 100,000 students across the islands.
