Big question: what if food could change the way kids learn?
Paul Kahan, Matthias Merges, and Jason Hammel decided to find out. What began with a group of Chicago chefs taking over classrooms at a CPS magnet school became Pilot Light, a nonprofit using food to make learning more engaging, relevant, and connected to the world outside school. Today, Pilot Light reaches students and teachers across the country, with programs in 28 states and more than 140,000 students reached.
In this special live episode of Joiners, we sit down with Paul, Matthias, and Jason to talk about Pilot Light’s scrappy beginnings, why chefs make surprisingly good educators, the challenge of bringing change into schools, and what it will take to make food education part of every child’s classroom experience.
And if this conversation gets you curious about Pilot Light, Tim and Danny will be hosting the organization’s Feed Your Mind Gala on November 6. It’s a great night built around some of Chicago’s best chefs, with food, live auction experiences, and plenty of fundraising for Pilot Light’s work in schools. Tickets are still available at feedyourmindgala.org. We get into a little more of what to expect at the end of the episode.
Listen to this episode