If Hancock resident Kin Schilling has her way, dining on fast foods will soon become a thing of the past for Monadnock region children.

Shocked by rising national statistics in childhood obesity and diabetes, Schilling has made it her mission to teach children healthy eating habits. Her dream, as founder of the Cornucopia Project, is to build a greenhouse at every Monadnock school, where students will plant, tend, harvest and eat organic food they grow themselves as part of their academic curriculum.

A chance encounter with an administrator from Crotched Mountain Rehabilitation Center in Greenfield led to an invitation to develop Schilling's pilot program during the last school year at Crotched Mountain School, a private residential and day facility for children with severe disabilities.

Students at the school, along with 15 fourth- and eighth-grade students from the extended learning program at Antrim's public Great Brook School, helped Schilling build six large, raised garden beds last spring in the courtyard adjacent to Crotched Mountain's Hayden Medical Residence. Materials were donated by local businesses.

Over the winter, Great Brook students had planted seeds in their school greenhouse. In late spring students and teachers from both schools planted and tended the vegetable seedlings, including onions, peas, peppers and cabbage, at the Crotched Mountain site.

When school resumes in September, students will harvest the crops together. The vegetables will be cooked and served in the Crotched Mountain School cafeteria.

Plans are underway to develop a farmer's market at Crotched Mountain to sell the surplus.

"We're using Crotched Mountain as an example of what you can do with school children," says Schilling. "The goal for the first year was building the raised beds, with the kids participating, and we've accomplished that. The next phase is to get the funds to build a greenhouse. We're aiming to accomplish that by July 2007."

To meet that goal, she's applied for several grants, and also plans to continue direct, public fundraising appeals for individual contributions.

Beyond Crotched Mountain School, the Cornucopia Project also extends to Schilling's work with nearly a dozen children ranging in age from 2 to 17 at a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) garden near her Hancock home, where she teaches them to plant vegetables and flowers, weed and stock the weekly harvest baskets for shareholders.

"This garden is planted by kids and weeded by kids. It's a CSA garden. It's a kids' garden," Schilling says.

Fifteen-year old Sally Weathers, a Connecticut resident who summers with her family in Hancock, is working with Schilling at the Norway Hill garden as part of a school approved internship.

Isabelle Rigrod, age 5, lives nearby.

"I love it. I come everyday. I garden, and I weed," says Rigrod.

Schilling, a longtime organic gardener and a former school cook, will soon continue her own education when she attends Slow Food International's sustainable food conference in Turin, Italy in October.

Slow Food was founded in the 1980s by Carlo Petrini, an Italian food writer, to counteract the prising popularity of fast foods and to support locally grown sustainable foods. He's described his effort as an "eco-gastronomic movement."

Representatives of the New York based Slow Food USA visited Schilling's project earlier this year and granted her an all-expenses paid trip to the Slow Food International 5-day conference in Italy.

Says Schilling, "The Cornucopia Project is all about teaching kids sustainable gardening. We need to teach kids to garden, to care for the earth in support of local sustainable agriculture. If we don't teach our children to shop locally and garden locally, we're in trouble. We're losing land left and right to corporations."

- Joan Geary

"Making a Difference," a weekly feature, is a collaborative project of The Keene Sentinel and Giving Monadnock, which seeks to raise public awareness of the role of nonprofits in the Monadnock Region (info@givingmonadnock.org or 357-7171). Prior reports in this series can be found in the "Special Reports" section of sentinelsource.com.