Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Lynn Fredericks. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Lynn, appreciate you joining us today. How did you get your first job in the field that you practice in today?

I was a food and wine write and restaurant consultant when i found myself divorced and a single mom of two very young sons in New York City. This freelance work went well when i was married, but it was challenging due to many nights out once i was on my own with my boys. When the youngest was just two years old, he was clinging to me leg in the kitchen as a tried to prepare dinner. It felt like one more job on a long day and he was driving me a bit crazy, whining and wanting to be picked up. So I did pick him up and looked at him and said I had a job for him! Before I knew it I sat him down at the table and gave him green beans. I asked him to take the ends off for me. As he dilegently tried his best to follow my instruction, I chatted with him happily about our meal as i continued cooking. Praising him for helping, when i stood behind him to inspect his work, the beans were all at odd and snapped in half, but – IT DID NOT MATTER! He was happy and I could cook in peace while enjoying his company. Soon this was an every night occurence with him getting a new task and me feeling liberated from whining child. I wanted to get his brother, then. 9 years, into the act so i invited him to grocery shop with me. I asked him to pick out vegetable, meat and starch for 3 days. We were both amazing when he chose a different vegetable and pork chops instead of chicken for one meal. He realized he could do much more in the kitchen so he was then willing to come and cook with me. Soon we were all 3 cooking and enjoying each others company at meal time. The seed of what would become FamilyCook Productions was planted and has grown and broadened over time.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

I am the founder of the not-for-profit organization, FamilyCook Productions. We develop, evaluate and disseminate ‘Teaching Kitchen’ or culinary nutrition curriculum for programs across the life-cycle. We license these programs for the last 20 years to schools, preschools, community centers, government agencies and more recently hospitals and clinics. Because we were pioneers all those years ago when I started this work in the mid-nineties, we have a certain stature in the field and have been leaders in identifying how to achieve measurable behavior changes. This is what I’m most proud of: our ability to develop effective programming, demonstrate its effectiveness and support newcomers to this field to start out with a program we offer that can bring about excellent outcomes. From there they can improve and refine for their population – but they are not re-inventing the wheel. They are building off a solid, effective foundation. I’m especially proud of our research on “10 Experiential Drivers of Behavior Change” that is being reference in the peer review literature by various teaching kitchen researchers. I’m proud of our Program Impact Award in 2020 for Teen Battle Chef from the Society of Nutrition Education and Behavior. This week, the prestigious Robin Hood Foundation just announced that FamilyCook was selected one of ten awardees for its Fuel for 50 Early Childhood Initiative for our “Nibble with Willow” programming, allowing it to expend to hundreds of more families across NYC in 2023. Finally i’m proud that we can support organizations across the US and in other countries through training and Licensing to conduct effective teaching kitchens and support thousands of young and old individuals to develop a healthy relationship with food. That has been the goal of my life’s work and it continues to expand.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

When one is a pioneer and an entrepreneur, it’s key to try to identify a business model and determine what the existing revenue sources would be for one’s business concept of service. When I’d been teaching culinary nutrition classes in schools myself after about 6 years, I was at a crossroads because to grow i’d have to employ many more teachers. Yet i knew myself well, and I knew that running a business that employed many instructors was not what i wanted. So we went the licensing and training model instead – which was new for this emerging field. As i established this model and saw that we could very successfully teach other instructors in schools and community organizations to teach our programming, i knew that we needed to identify reliable funding for client organizations to use. So in schools they could pay for our modestly priced curriculum and training through curriculum funds and professional development. For community organizations, it was similar, although SNAPEd federal resources became a mechanism, but it meant we had to quality which we took great pains to be sure we could. Over time, as we recognized clinical settings were becoming interested in culinary. medicine programming, i knew we needed to publish some original studies to hold our authority in this field in a concrete way. That study is being cited by teaching kitchen practitioners across the world. In sum, it’s been very gratifying to know that as we looked into the future and learned how to match existing opportunities while leading through breakthrough research and example, we have been able to support thousands to make healthy shifts in their lifestyle and maintain their health.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

We are a very small team of four persons, 3 of which (myself being one) have worked together for more than 10 years. This is very unusual. But i’ve attracted and maintained a cohesive team (including through the pandemic) by prioritizing the following:

1) Demonstrating respect, showing empathy and being flexible as an employer.
2) Practicing impeccable communication to ensure my team and I were always seeing eye to eyer, especially when challenges arise.
3) Be open to the ideas of my team, really listen and demonstrate that we are a team in the full sense of the word and i value their input and don’t practice a solely ‘top down’ management style where they can’t be heard.

These qualities have been fundamental to our success – after all, the work we do builds and evolves as we conduct programs and evaluate them. If i was constantly changing staff, it would hardly evolve, we’d do more rebuilding of core team than pushing the envelope and trying new strategies to be even more effective.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.familycookproductions.org
• Instagram: @FamilyCookNYC
• Facebook: FamilyCook Productions
• Linkedin: FamilyCook Productions
• Twitter: @familycooknyc
• Youtube: FamilyCook Productions

Image Credits
Credit: FamilyCook Productions