For years, I’ve been looking for a way to encourage kids to be more involved with Leket activities. Not just 2-3 hours of picking in the fields or volunteering in our Logistics Center. I see real value in the younger generation becoming involved in what Leket does and teaching them the importance of food rescue through all aspects. 

When I was growing up in Israel, there was a campaign to teach children about the importance of wildflowers. As a country, we spend a lot of time hiking and in fields and back then people who went hiking used to pick flowers along the way which were usually discarded at the end of the hike or for those flowers that survived the hike and the trip home, they would die in a vase on a table in the living room. To prevent this from happening, kids were taught about wildflowers, why they are important in the natural cycle of nature and the consequences of them completely disappearing from our nature reserves. Armed with this information, we went home and educated our parents and families and eventually the flowers bloomed again. Today it’s a well-known rule for hiking – do not pick wildflowers. This was a long way of explaining the power of education at a young age. If we teach our children at a pivotal age about food rescue, sustainability, and environment – perhaps we will be able to live a much more sustainable life on this beautiful blue marble. 

So, we dreamt about this and sure enough we are now moving ahead with it. With the help of Adi, a dedicated and brilliant volunteer, we built the “Leket Ambassador” program. The “Leket Ambassador” initiative is a year-long project being implemented in schools throughout Israel that belong to the Settlement Education Administration (not politically affiliated). The Administration had a budget for sustainability education but no plans and no way to implement it. Luckily, Leket Israel was a great fit and we provided them with our content and plan. Together, we built a year-long plan for schools where Leket Israel “trains the trainer”. What this means is that we create ambassadors who are taught all about Leket Israel and then they go out into their communities and inform them about the importance of our work.

In February 2023, the program was launched, and we had 83 children participate in the training. These kids went on to train their peers in their schools. At the end of the year, the ambassadors came together at the Yama school in the Arab village of Zemer (central Israel). All the schools participated in the end of the year event, after spending several months preparing for the special day. Posters of projects were displayed, ranging from cookbooks to paintings and graffiti about controlling Methane gas. Leket Ambassadors manned a stand at the center of the school explaining Leket’s goal and mission as well as explaining about food rescue in general. In the coming school year 2023/24, this program will be run in all 33 schools that are part of the Administration school system. 

I am also happy to share that youth movements who are already involved with Leket through the “Giving Tree” initiative, where children collect surplus citrus from trees in their hometown and deliver it to a local food pantry for distribution, will also be integrated into the Ambassadors Program as part of the communal outreach.

Education is always the key for self-improvement and a step to a better life. We support education at our level and hope to revolutionize the way we manage surplus and food rescue as an individual, a community, a country, and a world.