ACES partners with Olympic medalist to educate youth, increase food access

It's midday at the Seed to Table summer camp in the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Food, Agriculture, Nutrition Innovation Center (JJK FAN) in East St. Louis, Ill. The kids have spent the morning learning how to plant, tend to and, yes, even weed a vegetable garden. Now the campers are pivoting into the kitchen to make healthy produce-based snacks with Grace Margherio, a 4-H youth development educator with University of Illinois Extension. "After Seed to Table," Margherio says, "they can visualize how their food grows on plants and want to be more involved in growing and cooking it."

Agriculture is not usually what first comes to mind when people think of Jackie Joyner-Kersee, the seven-time track-and-field Olympic medalist considered the greatest heptathlete of all time. But as a native of East St. Louis whose family struggled at times to put food on the table, Joyner-Kersee has long been dedicated to creating opportunities for local children to flourish in a chronically impoverished city that’s also a food desert.

By combining the resources of its four founding partners—the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Foundation, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, and the East St. Louis nonprofit organization Lansdowne UP—JJK FAN shows kids and young teens how to feed their bodies, their minds, and their community. Through numerous programs at its growing East St. Louis campus—a new 24,000-square-foot center that opened this spring—JJK FAN also shows how the combination of food, science, and innovation creates lives and livelihoods so people can thrive.

The seed for JJK FAN was planted when agricultural technology entrepreneur Mark Scholl, ’73 ACES, happened to sit next to Joyner-Kersee on a flight from Washington, D.C., to St. Louis. As they discussed what it takes to become a world-class athlete and to make it as a farmer, they discovered common ground. "You need the same things," Scholl says. "You have to have a love of what you’re doing. You have to have a focus. You have to have faith. And you have to be there, day in and day out, and not give up."

What unfolded over the following years exemplifies not only that determination but also an incredible synergy, where multiple elements combined to produce an outcome far greater than the sum of their individual contributions.

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