Did you know 30% of our society's food is sent to landfills? This staggering statistic is a choice that each of us makes every time we eat. Cafeteria Victories is passionately dedicated to inspiring better choices. Our mission is to empower schools through student action to reduce food waste and promote sustainability. We found each other because we feel compelled to make a difference!
How many cafeteria victories do you have?
Cafeteria Victories offers a unique approach to sustainability that saves money for your school and encourages respons-ability amongst your classmates. We train 4th-12th grade student Green Team leaders to reduce food and packaging waste in school cafeterias through online after-school workshops. We tailor our support to align with your school's vision, be it a recycling, composting, recovery, or reusables campaign. What sets us apart is our focus on integrating leadership, science, and engineering practices into the conversation, all under the guidance of our credentialed teacher and blossoming youth experts nationwide.
Skill Development
Cafeteria Victories’ Campaign Success Series is a project-based learning workshop. During the workshop sessions, you collaborate with your Green Team and Green Teams from other schools to brainstorm, design, and implement a successful campaign aligned with your school's vision for eat-what-you-take, recycling, composting, recovery, or reusables campaigns.
The Big Ideas:
Goal: Your challenge is to design and engineer a systematic method for monitoring your school's lunch court waste and minimizing our effect on local landfills. MS-ESS3-3
Role: As members of your school's design team (Green Team), you will monitor the current cafeteria & lunch court procedures, decide what criteria to measure and gather data, and plan and implement a student-based system that reduces the waste our school sends to the landfill.
Integrate the Engineering Design Process:
- ask
- imagine
- plan & design solutions
- create
- improve
Perform authentic leadership skills:
- empathy
- teamwork
- motivation
- mentorship
- communication
- confidence
Apply Next Generation Science and Engineering Practices:
- analyze & interpret data
- use mathematics & computational thinking
- engage in argument from evidence
- obtain, evaluate, and communicate information
Meet Disciplinary Core Ideas standards:
MS-ESS3-3 apply scientific principles to design a method for monitoring and minimizing a human impact on the environment
5-ESS3-1 obtain and combine information about ways individual communities use scientific ideas to protect the Earth’s resources and environment.
Craft Cross-Cutting Concepts Competency:
- Patterns
- Cause & Effect
- Scale, proportion, and quantity
- System and system models
Utilize Gifted & Talented depth & complexity thinking:
- big idea
- language of the discipline
- patterns and trends
- rules and changes over time
- multiple perspectives
- ethics
Practice Business Skills
- project management
- time management
- networking
- negotiation
Differentiation
Our interactive and engaging workshop sessions allow all participants to thoroughly get to know each other's personalities, learning styles, and strengths so that we can tailor your education to your ambitions while providing support and enrichment. The emphasis on multiple perspectives and ethics helps us address differentiation for students from diverse cultures, languages, and special needs. Each member of your team will select your own emphasis for skill development, further customizing your growth. We use breakout rooms to enhance differentiation.
Schedule
Our workshops are designed to fit into your schedule. We meet online after school for one hour on Wednesdays. With one registration, your school/organization can provide up to 10 members access to this valuable learning.
Workshops begin on the hour.
:00 Welcome & Mindset Calibration
:15 Teams share e-pitch & a cafeteria victory
:31 25m Project Tuning modeling or breakouts
:56 3m Visualization
About Cafeteria Victories
Sarah Diaz, M.Ed., founded Cafeteria Victories after over twenty-five years of observing wasteful practices in her schools’ cafeterias. Her credentialed teaching experience, her former role as a San Diego Unified "Love Food, Not Waste" Program Specialist, our belief in empowering individuals, and our dedication to the mission of waste reduction and sustainability are the driving forces behind our company. We are proud to be a women-owned business serving youth, schools, and districts in the Pacific, Mountain, Central, and Eastern time zones.