"Good Food" Can Change Everything: Sunny Young at TEDxManhattan

Sunny Young is the winner of this year's TEDxManhattan Challenge. She is the director of Edufood Consulting LLC, a school food reform consulting firm, and program manager of Good Food for Oxford Schools (GFOS) in Oxford, MS, a project that combines farm to school initiatives, school gardens, and nutrition education. Her passion for good, clean, and fair food arose during a semester working on a fair trade vanilla farm in Madagascar. A transformative experience, Young left the farm knowing that she wanted to dedicate her career to food justice.

After graduating college, Young moved to Boulder, CO, where she worked with Chef Ann Cooper, also known as the "Renegade Lunch Lady," on her mission to change the way kids eat. Alongside Cooper, Young became a Jill-of-all-trades, working with the Boulder Valley School District's School Food Project and coordinating Cooper's Food Family Farming Foundation (F3). Through her work with F3, Young managed The Lunch Box website, which provides free tools and resources to communities interested in improving school food, as well as the Healthy Breakfast 4 Kids and Lets Move Salad Bars to Schools grants.

In 2012, Young moved to the great state of Mississippi where she runs the Oxford school district's GFOS initiative, the first school food reform program of its kind in the state. Additionally, Young serves as the National Farm to School Networks liaison for the state, a role that allows her to work toward creating widespread change by bringing lessons learned from Oxford's programs to all of Mississippi.

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)