Full Plates Full Potential

JMG’s partnership with Full Plates Full Potential supports student-led collaborations in Maine schools that are focused on increasing awareness of student hunger and ensuring that every child is able to access school meals.

Access to school nutrition affects a child’s academic success, attendance, and social and emotional well-being. By collaborating with their student peers, school nutrition teams, and administrators, JMG students investigate hunger in their respective schools in order to develop projects to solve the problems they identified in accessing food at school.

Partnership Goals

To build awareness of school nutrition programs with JMG students and Specialists.
To create more conversations about how essential school meals are.
To increase participation in school meals.

How It Works

Students work with their peers and the nutrition department to understand barriers to accessing school meals.
Student-led projects address food insecurity in their own schools.
Students implement projects that will be funded by JMG & Full Plates to address the problem they have identified.
Students present their projects and findings to school administration.

Partnership In Action

The JMG Full Plates Full Potential partnership launched in the fall of 2021 in 10 Maine school districts with JMG programs.

The student-led collaborations ranged from creating gardens and greenhouses to increase fresh produce in school meals, to purchasing a sandwich and salad cart that would simultaneously offer more customizable and healthy options for students while decreasing the wait times in the school lunch line to ensure students had more time to actually eat their lunches.

This school year, 16 new schools in 10 districts across Maine are participating in the program.