How would you like to get involved at school with food?

Student Voices campaign (official) | english

Photo credit: Katelyn MacLellan,
Master of Public Health (Nutrition and Dietetics) student, University of Toronto

Students have powerful voices.

As school food programs are developed and expanded across Canada it’s important for students to be able to tell local, provincial, territorial and federal decision-makers what kind of programs they want as well as how they want to participate in them, whether that’s tasting foods, giving input on menus, or growing, preparing or serving food in their school programs.

Research from school food programs around the world teaches us that involving a diversity of students makes programs more successful. When students are engaged, they are more likely to eat the food served and try new items. They can also be key advocates, helping to inform decision-makers about program needs and vision.

The Coalition for Healthy School Food is launching the A.M.P. Up Student Voices for School Food campaign to better enable educators and community organizations to mobilize and amplify student voices and to support students to actively and meaningfully participate in decisions and programs at their school, whether that is through classes or school-based extracurricular clubs.

About the campaign

In 2024, after years of advocacy, the Government of Canada launched a National School Food Program and Policy and began to provide funding to all provinces and territories and Indigenous partners / communities. The power of student voice, particularly student letters, was a big part of securing Canada’s investment.

In 2025 the Coalition worked with schools across the country to engage students in further speaking out for school food programs at local, provincial / territorial and federal levels. The A.M.P. Up campaign shares many of the activities that we’ve seen work. We hope these activities can inspire ideas for your own student mobilization and engagement activities to allow students to shape school food programs that work for them.

There is a strong educational rationale and diverse curriculum connections for engaging students in sharing their voices around investing in, designing and implementing school food programs. School food programs are a current events issue that impacts students, providing an authentic opportunity for civic engagement, including identifying and analyzing an issue in their community and country.

A.M.P. Up Student Voices for School Food Activities

The A.M.P. Up Student Voices for School Food activities are practical tools to help educators, students, and community partners Amplify, Mobilize, and Participate in school food conversations.

These activities are designed to help students share what school food means to them, express what they want to see in their programs, and take part in shaping school food at the local, provincial, territorial, and federal levels.

They can be used in classrooms, student clubs, school food committees, or community-based programs.

Use the activities below as starting points. They can be adapted to your school, age group, curriculum, and community context.

Letter-Writing

The power of student voice was a big part of securing Canada’s investment in a National School Food Program. Hand-written letters from students from across Canada were delivered to the Prime Minister in the Fall of 2023. When the government announced the National School Food Policy in 2024 in two locations on opposite coasts, Nova Scotia and British Columbia, the Prime Minister and Minister of Finance brought original copies of students’ letters that they shared during their speeches.

Curriculum connections in Social Studies (elementary level) and Civics and Citizenship, or the like, (secondary level) provide students with an opportunity to learn about school food as a current events issue that affects them. Letter writing to federal, provincial or territorial officials provides an authentic opportunity for civic action that they can take. These letters ensure the important voice of students involved are heard by decision-makers and inform investment and implementation of programs.

Sentence stems can be very helpful for elementary students to focus and share their voice

Examples include:

School food matters to me because…
Investment in healthy school food is a good idea because…
It is important for there to be more healthy food for all students at school because…

Here is a sample letter template (an example), which was used by Grade 5-7 students at Lord Roberts Elementary in Vancouver, when they wrote letters to the Prime Minister and their Member of Parliament in 2023.

It can often be helpful to discuss the issues around school food programs with students, including creating a brainstorm of key issues, benefits, and what the students want to see in a school food program. This can help inform the writing of their own letters, supporting students to powerfully and clearly express their own voice.

Audience: Students’ letters can be sent to federal, provincial / territorial, and/or local decision-makers, including school principals.

You can send the letters to Members of Parliament (MPs) in Canada for free—no stamp required—when mailing to their Ottawa office.

Simply address your letter to the MP at the House of Commons, Ottawa, ON, K1A 0A6, and ensure your return address is included. This applies to letters to MPs and the Prime Minister. Some provinces and territories also provide free postage, so please look into this relevant to your location.

Creative art and messages

Getting students involved in creating art with short written messages provides another opportunity for students to share perspectives in their own words and through creative expression.

Students can be supported and encouraged to reflect on what school food means to them and to express their voice and creativity to speak out for school food programs that benefit students from coast to coast to coast.

Activity #1 from the 2026 Great Big Crunch Activity Toolkit is an example of how to engage students in creative art and messages. In this activity students are provided with a paper apple and asked to write a short message about school food by completing one or more of the sentence stems:

Crunching on healthy food at school helps me…
School food matters to me because...
It is important for there to be more healthy food for all students at school because…

Some examples of apples with written messages from students can be found here.

There are many other possibilities for creative expression through art and writing. We encourage you to brainstorm new ideas with your students. Developing food puns and art has been another fun and engaging activity to get students thinking about how to creatively share their voice around school food.

Here are some examples of posters made by students for their MP and Minister of Education in Whitehorse, Yukon, using both sentence stems and food puns.

Here are some of the food puns that the students from Lord Roberts Elementary in Vancouver came up with for the lunch trays displayed on the B.C. Legislature steps when teacher Brent Mansfield ran on October 16, 2024 for World Food Day (see news coverage of run and trays here):

Lettuce have school food for all
School food is berry important
School food programs are rad-ish
I bagel you to have school food for all
Peas invest in school food
I’m rooting for school food
School food is what I’m taco-ing about
Nothing beets school food
School food is eggstraordinary
I carrot about school food
I’ll be cherry grape-ful to have a healthy meal at school

Lunch trays with student art and messages on display at the BC Legislature

Completed apples or other creative art can be shared to help highlight student perspectives on school food.

Options include:

displaying in classrooms or school hallways
sharing them with school leadership or school districts, or sent to federal or provincial / territorial decision-makers
submitting them to the Coalition for Healthy School Food to be shared more broadly

Student photo voice

Photo voice is another method to capture and share students’ perspectives and stories about school food programs. Photo voice is an arts-based method in which participants take photos to capture their own experiences, accompanied by written captions or stories. It can be a powerful tool to understand the experiences of students at school and involved in school food programs. Photo voice is an opportunity to engage students in a fun and creative way of capturing, reflecting on and sharing their unique perspectives.

After learning the intentions and expectations of the photo voice activity, students are sent out with cameras, either digital cameras or cellphones, to capture images that represent perspectives on what matters most to them about school food programs. They are then supported to explore the reasons behind the photos they took through writing captions or short stories for their photos. For example, students could explain why they took the photo, what is happening in the photo, and/or the feeling they had while taking the photo.

The resulting photos and written reflections can be used to better understand the perspectives of students on the program, which can be used to adapt and improve the program. The experiences and hopes of students related to school food programs can also be shared with decision-makers, much like has been suggested for other activities.

Activity

Give instructions to students: eg. take 5 photos of how school food programs (lunch, breakfast, snack) have impacted your school day.

These could be photos of:

things they see, touch, eat, share.

places that make them think of school food
their favourite parts of school lunch or things they’d change.

Provide students with a prescribed amount of time to take photos (eg. before class next week, by the end of the day)

Ask students to write captions or short stories for their photos. For example, students could explain why they took the photo, what is happening in the photo, and/or the feeling they had while taking the photo.

Think about how students might want to share images and stories to communicate their experiences and ideas with others. This could be a display in the school, sharing it with school board staff involved in planning the school food program, or making a display to students’ voices

For an example of using student photo voice to gain students’ perspectives on school food programs you can learn more about how Nourish Nova Scotia has used it here.

Student Leadership Clubs and Committees

Students, particularly at the secondary level, are often involved in co-curricular activities such as clubs, committees, or councils to support student leadership. Co-curricular activities take place outside the classroom but enhance students’ learning in meaningful ways. Clubs, committees, or councils offer an important avenue to support student voice in advocacy for school food programs and for seeking student input so programs meet the needs and visions of the students who are involved in them. This can happen where an existing student club - whether a Social Justice Club, Student Council or Equity and Diversity Committee - chooses to focus on school food programs, both mobilizing student voices to improve what is happening in their school and advocating beyond their school for more investment in school food programs.

Alternatively, specific student leadership committees can be established to focus on student voice and leadership in school food programs. The Karma Closet at Northumberland Regional High School in Westville, Nova Scotia is one such example. With a goal to improve student access to food and other necessities, students have created a free lunch program that operates several times a week by working with several teachers, including the culinary arts teacher. Students from the Karma Closet at Northumberland were involved in a letter-writing campaign, which helped contribute to the Federal investment in a National School Food Program.

Another example is the Student Nutrition Advocacy Committee at Kennedy Collegiate (SNAC-K) in Windsor, Ontario which was supported by OSNP Southwest and the Coalition for Healthy School Food. Students were guided through the engagement activities outlined below, coming together weekly for several months to go through the planning process that included a school food assessment, designing and carrying out a student survey, and developing a food vision and recommendations, and sharing their voices through a film, in which many students were interviewed. More about the SNAC-K and a link to the film can be found here.

Elements of this student engagement process can provide a template for how student leadership clubs could be involved in developing student voice and vision for school food programs and advocacy.

SNAC-K Student Engagement Planning

Hosting MPs, MPPs / MLAs, trustees

Another powerful opportunity for students to share their voices on school food programs with elected decision-makers - federal, provincial / territorial, municipal, or school district - is to invite them to visit your school to see your school food programs in action. Many decision-makers love the opportunity to get out into the community and see the impact of policies and programs on the ground. Students, though not yet voters, provide a valuable and critical perspective on school food programs, which many will be keen to hear.

Organizing a school visit could benefit from being combined with other activities from the A.M.P. Up campaign, such as letter-writing, which could include an invitation to decision makers to visit your program. Other options could include students sharing some of their voices through other activities, whether in a display or a short presentation. This could include student photo voice, creative art and messages, or the results of a survey on how students want to be involved in school food programs.

It can work well to designate two or three students to serve as lead hosts. These students should be confident in their communication and clear on key messages, which have been developed through various activities with the entire class or student group.

Depending on the nature of your school food program, it would be great to invite the guest to share food with the students to give them a full experience. This could then be followed by a short presentation in which more students can be given the opportunity to share their perspectives, talk about the impacts of school food programs, and the outputs of any AMP Up activities.

Inviting student input on how they want to be involved

Many decisions about school food programs are made without input from those most impacted: students. There is a big opportunity to seek the voices of students on what kind of programs they want and how they want to be involved.

When students are asked, there is often significant enthusiasm for how they want to be involved in their school food programs. The sample question below was asked by students at Kennedy Collegiate as part of an online survey developed to get students’ perspectives on a variety of aspects of food at school.

Growing food Helping to serve breakfast, snacks or lunch Help to make and prepare breakfast, snacks or lunch Get involved with deciding the menus or what food gets provided at school Get involved with a committee for student advocacy and input I am not interested in participating While there were some students that were only interested in eating, there are a large number of students that want to be involved in a variety of different ways. We have found this a powerful question to ask students, providing an important window into students’ visions for school food programs. The photos above are examples of how other schools invited student input on how students would like to get involved. Students were able to ‘vote’ on their answer after picking up their lunch. Other ways to gather student input could be through sticky notes or on a large piece of white paper with markers. Students often highlight that programs can also be an educational opportunity. They have suggested that programs could help students: learn how to safely prepare food address negative perceptions about healthy food achieve balance in their diet prepare and plan healthy and affordable meals *from the National School Food Policy Engagements - What We Heard Report Once students’ perspectives on how they want to be involved in the school food program have been gathered, they can be shared and actioned through a variety of the other campaign activities. Perhaps asking students this question could inform their letter-writing to decision makers. Or it could be part of a process with a student club or committee to develop a plan for meaningful student involvement. Either way, you are well on your way to mobilizing and amplifying student voices and encouraging meaningful avenues for student participation.

GBC2026_Photo_4_NouveauBrunswick_EcoleMarguerite-Bourgeoys_Photo_1_PhotoCredit_Jeannie Lav

Student involvement and
input in school food programs

There are many ways that students can be directly involved and give input into their school food programs, and these can provide a diversity of opportunities for student leadership and developing food literacy. A good place to consider starting could be to ask students how they might like to get involved (see other activity here).

These activities could be directly linked to classes, through a food studies or nutrition class, or other opportunities for volunteer or course credits, such as community service learning.

Possibilities for student involvement include:

Helping to make and prepare breakfast, snacks or lunch
Helping to serve breakfast, snacks or lunch
Involve students in food delivery by having students pick up or drop off snack bins
Helping with clean up

Opportunities for student input into include:

Getting students involved with deciding the menus or what food gets provided at school
Taste testing of new menu items
Survey students
Gather student feedback and suggestions

LunchLAB in Vancouver, BC is an educational lunch program, a partnership between the school district and charity Growing Chefs, where students from Grade 6 and 7 get to be on the Chef Team to work with chefs-in-residence to help prepare and serve lunch to over 200 of their peers. Students are also involved in the Clean Team, scraping and rinsing lunch trays and cutlery before they are loaded into the dishwasher.

Here are a couple of great resources on involving students in school food programs:

From Newfoundland and Labrador: Engaging Students in School Food (includes why, how, and taste test tips, and a sample survey)

From Manitoba: Food Literacy in School Food Programs (ways to get students involved in different types of programs to build food literacy)

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