Rhodes Remembered with Cooking Session at Our House

Our House students recently prepared and assembled 190 dinners for Potluck Food Rescue in a two-hour cooking session at Our House. The community service event also served as a memorial for Clinton School graduate Jenna Rhodes, who passed away in July 2019.

Kids Cookin’ for a Cause! is a program in which kids cook for hungry Arkansans. Kids Cook! developed the program to benefit Kids’ Pantries that are served by Potluck Food Rescue.  The Kids’ Pantry is Arkansas’s only charitable out-of-school meal program developed to ensure that at-risk youngsters have the opportunity to receive food for meals when school is not in session – throughout the year.

“Jenna was an early and ongoing supporter of the SPORK program,” said Faith Anaya, founder and leader of Kids Cook!. “What the program has become is due in part to her continual encouragement over the years.  She and I were friends and I appreciate the times that she helped me think through issues that I was facing in developing my cooking programs.”

SPORK is a nutrition-based, hands-on cooking program for middle school kids and their families. Kids Cook! collaborated with the Clinton School of Public Service, Pulaski County Youth Services, and Arkansas Children’s Hospital to develop the program which includes nutrition sessions for parents and a family meal made entirely by the kids. Now in its 10th year, the program has been delivered 58 times in nineteen central Arkansas schools, afterschool programs, and libraries and has reached more than 700 kids and their families.

Rhodes, who coordinated the SPORK program in 2013-14, most recently worked as a Program Manager for the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS). She had recently accepted an offer to lead the Farm to School program for the Arkansas Department of Agriculture.

As a Clinton School student, she was a member of the Practicum team assigned to Delta Garden Study which has since evolved into Arkansas Farm to School, a student team-based project she supervised in 2017-18. She also supervised a 2016-17 Practicum project with the Arkansas Children’s Research Institute’s Childhood Obesity Prevention Research Program.

Rhodes’ other field service work with the Clinton School included developing an organic garden and farmer’s market program in Nicaragua and building stakeholder teams to assist in the visioning process of Metroplan’s Imagine Central Arkansas Campaign. She served as a graduate assistant at the Clinton School’s River Market campus.

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