Thanks LuTia and Braedon for your MCHS AmeriCorps Service!

New Leaf Foods is deeply grateful to LuTia Colbert and Braedon Richlen, who have served as MCHS AmeriCorps Members for their 2023-24 service year. Their talented and dedicated service has advanced our mission of improving healthy food access and education and building a healthy local food system. They have also improved our organizational capacity for future progress! It has been our great joy to know and work with them. We wish them continued good work and the brightest of futures!

LuTia, Thanks for sharing your passion for education and writing and your community outreach skills!

LuTia at New Leaf Prep Academy School Orchard Installation & at Seymour Park Food Forest Installation

LuTia’s service as an AmeriCorps Member with New Leaf Foods has 1) educated families about food insecurity, sustainable food systems, and food for good health and 2) connected and empowered people to sources of healthy local foods.

LuTia focused on education about healthy local food and the ways our community is working together to improve healthy local food access and promote food security. She is especially interested in promoting environmental justice and food security for food insecure populations and in the future of food security for all in the face of environmental disruptions in our food and agricultural systems.

She sought out the opportunity to serve as a Marshfield Clinic Health System AmeriCorps Member because she wants improving public health through high quality food access and education to be her life’s work, and she is well on her way! She served on the state volunteer board as a youth commissioner. She received a grant to bring kids from the Boys and Girls Club to area gardens and farms to learn about where their food comes from.

She represented New Leaf Foods at various community events--Winterfest, the annual State of the Broadway District event, Wello 5th Annual Wellbeing Summit, and the Brown County Seed Library Launch, Community Garden installations, and Titletown Night Market. At these events LuTia is our face to the many other organizations and volunteers who make our community thrive.

LuTia has written blog posts for New Leaf Foods on food insecurity and health, food waste, farm-to-school programs, seed library, eating locally, and low-income resident can grow their own food gardens. Her talent for research and writing are put to good use.

New Leaf Foods supports composting food waste. She created a video interview about a local composting business--NEW Compost--for New Leaf as part of her AmeriCorps service. It currently has 1.4K views and increased the subscriber count of the New Leaf Foods YouTube channel by 40.

She plans to continue working as a volunteer for New Leaf Foods Education Team after her AmeriCorps service is completed in August of this year and to combine her studies with education and research related to furthering New Leaf’s mission. Thank you, LuTia!

Braedon, Thanks for sharing your professional and technical knowledge and your organizational skills!

Braedon at Bay Port HS Career Day and at Seymour Park Food Forest Installation

Braedon was a key volunteer with New Leaf’s Community Orchard project and ran our Bountiful Branches sale. He pitched in with planting when needed. Here he is helping at the Seymour Park Food Forest installation. Importantly, Braedon helped tell the story of how empowering people to grow their own fruits and vegetables promotes good health. Here he is a Bay Port High School talking about New Leaf Foods.

Braedon has worked tirelessly on tasks that require technical expertise with communication, internet, and security systems. Long hours, thorough research, thoughtful recommendations for data system advancements—characterize his work. His recent university degrees in communication and management are being put into action full force in improving our data management and internet security systems.

He is working hard to make our systems efficient so that we do not waste valuable volunteer time looking for documents, duplicating paperwork, or confronting security threats. And he is training all of our volunteers in how to make best use of the new systems.

The first thing Braedon helped with was establishing a Google for Non-profits Workspace for New Leaf Foods. Since then, Braedon has been training all of the board members in how to use it effectively and is always available to answer questions.

Braedon reviewed all of our communication channels and recommended consolidating separate accounts, changing our donation software, and most importantly, switching our website host and domain registration.

Making such systemic changes over a short period would be a significant task for any organization. For New Leaf it was huge because we are a grassroots volunteer-run organization. It is a testament to the confidence we have in Braedon and his skills that we adopted all of the changes that he recommended. The results of Braedon’s sharing his professional skills have greatly increased New Leaf’s organizational capacity to serve our community!

Thank you, Braedon!