Stephanie Colchado Kelley, South Cumberland Plateau Vista Project Director
Watch her DataFest 2023 talk:
South Cumberland Plateau VISTA Project (SCP-VISTA) Director Stephanie Colchado Kelley has a long career in nonprofit management and community-oriented programs. She is a woman who finds joy in community building, horizontal collaboration, and strategy design. She interprets these intricacies to establish strong foundations and direction for more equitable and accessible systems.
Stephanie was a natural fit for SCP-VISTA, which is wrapping up its final year of operation on the South Cumberland Plateau. As director, she supports and works alongside AmeriCorps VISTA service members to connect individuals and organizations to help communities tackle their toughest challenges. VISTA provides capacity for nonprofits and governmental agencies working on systems and structures like housing, health, and food in order to better serve communities dealing with the realities of long-term economic inequity.
In rural middle Tennessee, one important SCP-VISTA effort is the coordination of the South Cumberland Summer Meal Program (SCSMP): a sustained, focused, multi-partner initiative to increase food availability for area children during the summer months of June and July, when the safety net of the K-12 school nutrition program is not operating.
Stephanie, who had volunteered with the summer meal program prior to her SCP-VISTA appointment, was new to the program’s administrative side. During summer of 2022, she studied trends and patterns present in current and past operations and noticed a significant sustainability challenge: the funding model for the program is based on a set reimbursement cost for meals distributed to eligible participants. This reimbursement becomes the basis for next year’s operational funds. Meals that are incomplete, mispackaged, or not distributed are not reimbursed.
Incomplete and mispackaged meals can be remedied on the production side if volunteers and production staff mind their P’s & Q’s and count everything correctly (the program utilizes a double count system). Determining the correct number of meals to order, however, is more problematic; over time, these wasted meals can jeopardize the program's financial stability.
After talking to site partners and drawing on her own experience working with community programs, Stephanie recognized that at the heart of this issue lies a very real, human concern. When a volunteer has spent an hour and a half distributing food, and the food runs out, the primary thought is NOT about the program’s financial stability. Watching a child walk away without this necessary resource is painful for both parties. And so, overordering occurs. It is a natural and normal reaction of compassionate human beings to gird against this unfortunate outcome in the future.
Complicating this sensitive issue is the necessary two-week forecasting window that SCSMP must accommodate. Coordinating a massive food program on a rural, geographically-isolated plateau that deals with long-term challenges of poverty is a tall order, and fresh food of this quantity does not make it up “the mountain” without considerable time, effort, and planning. To ensure all federally-approved components are available, SCSMP’s meal production partner, Sewanee Dining, needs roughly two weeks of lead time to communicate with vendors to place meal component orders (produce, meats, and dairy all arrive on different days of the week). This allows time for vendors to source and transport food, and for production to assemble and package meal components for distribution.
Historically, a large amount of guesswork has gone into choosing the number of meals that will be provided at meal distribution sites. The “magic number” is determined by a combination of community partner input, administrative intuition, and dining hall feedback. It’s an imperfect system, and a little like peering into a foggy, broken crystal ball. Sometimes order numbers are spot on, but often they are not. Minimizing the number of non-reimbursable meals is crucial if the program is to continue.
In early 2023, a federal government ruling allowed SCSMP to operate permanently under a “rural, non-congregate model.” This model allows for grab-n-go, drive-through meal service where recipients take home a week’s worth of meals for each child in one stop. In an area that struggles with transportation, this shift drastically increases accessibility to services and drives up participant numbers. It changes the game– but it also means less margin of error for ordering meals.
Stephanie contacted Jim Peterman, one of the Datalab founders and her previous director at the Office of Civic Engagement (where SCP-VISTA is housed), to see if Datalab could give insight into narrowing this margin. Jim led her to Eric Ezell, who set up digital collection forms to convert SCSMP’s eight-year paper form history into usable data. Maggie Willis, the Hunger Relief VISTA at the time, suggested utilizing SCSMP volunteers to digitize the data. Katie Goforth, Community Development Director for South Cumberland Community Fund and University of the South, who holds significant institutional memory on SCSMP and its community partners, provided insight into important data points.
These investigative efforts led to a meeting between Elena Eneva, the 2023 Datalab Director, and Stephanie to discuss what tools and resources Datalab might provide SCSMP. A final call requesting support from No Kid Hungry helped to secure the partnership. No Kid Hungry is a national campaign run by Share Our Strength, a nonprofit working to solve problems of hunger and poverty in the United States and around the world.
In the course of eight weeks, four Datalab fellows (Eden Alem, Bryce Comer, Carson Coody, and Orion Gant) collaborated closely with their faculty advisor, datalab staff members, and SCSMP to identify important questions and patterns in historical data. The Datalab team considered pertinent variables such as weather, community health trends, community event impacts, and more. They worked with South Cumberland Plateau AmeriCorps Summer Associates (led by service members Jessie Atkinson and Mollie McWhorter) to digitize information and also created methods to gather, validate, and analyze the massive amount of program data available.
The fellows gently challenged assumptions, creatively examined long-term patterns, and produced a usable tool which will increase the accuracy of predicting the number of participants at a meal site with a two-week lead time.
The South Cumberland Summer Meal Program, wrapping up its ninth year of operation in 2023, stands as a testament to the power of vision, dedication, and commitment of community partnerships.
SCSMP is a federally funded, state-administered program that University of the South sponsors on a local level. This Summer Food Service Program, a program of Federal Nutrition Services / United States Department of Agriculture, is a partnership between SCP-VISTA and its sister organization, South Cumberland Plateau AmeriCorps, South Cumberland Community Fund, University of the South Sewanee Dining, TN Department of Human Services, and a number of local community partner organizations in Grundy County TN and Franklin County TN that serve as meal site locations.
In 2023, these meal sites included Beersheba Springs Assembly (Beersheba Springs, TN), Community Harvest Church of God (Coalmont, TN), Epiphany Mission Church (Sherwood, TN), Franklin County Prevention Coalition (Winchester, TN), Franklin County Public Library (Winchester, TN), Grundy County Housing Authority (Monteagle, TN), Grundy Recovery Alliance Community Endeavors (Coalmont, TN), Grundy Safe Communities Coalition (Tracy City, TN), Palmer Community Center (Palmer, TN), Pelham United Methodist Church (Pelham, TN), St. James’ Midway Park Pavilion (Sewanee, TN), Tracy City Public Library (Tracy City, TN), and Wings of Hope (Decherd, TN). In 2023 the program additionally participated, for the first time, in the Grundy County Health Council’s annual Back to School Bash event. In 2023, SCSMP distributed more than 26,000 meals over the course of eight weeks.
