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

Nancy, appreciate you joining us today. Often the greatest growth and the biggest wins come right after a defeat. Other times the failure serves as a lesson that’s helpful later in your journey. We’d appreciate if you could open up about a time you’ve failed.

I love this question because I have an interesting relationship to failure. On one hand, I seriously never think that I will fail. I remember being asked once on a panel to share what failure looked like and it was the only time in my life that I had been stumped! I had no idea what to say.

The other side of this relationship is that I fail everyday and in a weird way I thrive on those small failures. It helps me to think about how I can do better – on anything from my morning run to a conversation with my husband to a meeting with a team member. And I really work hard to encourage my team members to be okay with their “failures”. Someone recently shared a great quote with me: “Failure is a comma, not a period. The story is not over”. I want my team (and my children!) to understand that we can learn so much from stumbling and falling. Usually a new idea or innovation can come from that stumbling and that is a very good thing.

So, to answer the question, a memorable failure that led to an even greater innovation was in 2001 when I was leading a middle school. The school was shut down by the state due to poor student performance. BIG FAIL. We, as young teachers and school leaders, prided ourselves in getting our student’s test scores from 0 (basically not reading on grade level) up to 1’s and 2’s. The highest rating was 4 and we have very few 4’s. The point is, we were improving but not to the standard of the state. It was a devastating battle to try to keep our school open and at one point, coming home late in the evening after as school board meeting, knowing my first born had already gone to bed without me, I just welled up in tears and said out loud to myself, “I can’t fight this anymore”. What a fail. But, that “failure” essentially inspired Wellness in the Schools. I realized through my experience working in this school in a very high poverty community in NYC that children needed so much more support in life for success, namely better food and more movement. So, learning from the failure without harping on it led me to create Wellness in the Schools. Today, one of those students is a Wellness in the Schools Chef, only realizing after he was hired that the founder is the same person who had to set him straight when he was 13!

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I come to this work as an educator and a lifelong health advocate. I was raised in the 70’s in south Florida where I spent most of my days running around outdoors in the sunshine; and by parents who thought I could accomplish whatever I set my mind to. It should also be noted that my mother was fondly named “Nature Lady” by our friends because she kept a garden, raised chickens and talked the local athletic club into selling citrus instead of candy for their annual fundraiser. Let’s just say that no one in school wanted to share my lunch of a brown bread sandwich and carob brownie. But this has served me well, mom! Our health is everything and I have dedicated my career to ensure that all children have access to nutritious meals and active lifestyles.

Fast forward to the early 90’s where I was running a school on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. There I saw firsthand the impact of poor diet and lack of physical activity on children’s ability to learn and I recognized the deep connection between nutrition, academic performance, and overall well-being. The 11, 12 and 13 year olds whom I was teaching could not walk up a flight of stairs without stopping to catch their breath. They couldn’t focus in class. This was an aha moment for me. These children had no chance in hell for a thriving future – they were fueled by cheap ultra-processed food and sedentary days. From those lower east side hallways, Wellness in the Schools was born.

What started in 2005 in a single New York City classroom at the Ella Baker School, PS 225, has since grown into a national movement. Today, in partnership with local departments of education, our programs reach more than one million students in over 2,000 schools across five major markets: New York, New Jersey, California, Florida, and Washington, D.C. Over the past 19 years, we have cooked more than 50 million school meals and led over 86,000 hours of play.

In 2022, WITS launched Chefs in the Schools and New York City’s first-ever Chef Council—a Menu Development, Chef Training, and Education program designed to impact all NYC public schools. This initiative was created in collaboration with the Mayor’s Office of Food Policy and the Office of Food and Nutrition Services, with the goal of elevating school meals and training kitchen staff to prepare nutritious and delicious, scratch-cooked food.

Building on this momentum, in 2023, we introduced Coach Connect (formerly Coach for Good) and NYC’s first-ever Coach Council, a fitness program piloted in NYC public schools. Developed in partnership with Exos and the Office of School Wellness Programs, this initiative is designed to enhance physical activity and promote overall student wellness.

Through these programs and ongoing partnerships, our team continues to drive systemic change, ensuring that school environments have the support they need for the health and wellbeing of every child.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

Managing a team and maintaining high morale (ie, positive company culture) is really important to me. I have played on sports teams all of my life and I love being on teams. I think that so much of the lessons from sports teams are transferable to being on a “company team”.

First, everyone wants to “win”. Support my team members to “win” – to achieve their individual goals, which level up to your organizational goals. I have extremely high expectations, but I offer an extreme amount of support to meet those demands. People feel empowered when they meet a high expectation.

Second, listen to your team members. Everyone wants to be heard. And, every voice truly matters and can make a difference in the output of programming. I do this with true authenticity because I love hearing from team members. I think you have to love to lead in order to lead well. I love listening to my team, visiting our schools and hearing stories from the field. I listen with an open mind to better understand where we can do better. I sit with a 20-something to hear about how her program is working, its challenges and successes (the challenges are more important to me). I listen to chefs when they have suggestions about the program and then actually bring them to life (well, not all of them). I have weekly meetings with my director team and push them to share where we can do better. People want to be part of a solution, part of making something better. Prioritize and optimize that.

Finally, lead by example. I try not to ask anyone to do a task or a job that I either have not done myself or am open to doing alongside them if they need support.

I run a non profit and budgets are always tight. We do not incentivize via paychecks. Our return is in emotional capital. We get to find meaning in our work by seeing the impact of our work daily in schools and that goes a very long way. In many ways, it is easy for me to keep morale high as the work we do does the trick.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

First and simply, we continue to show up and do great work. I have team members who have been with Wellness in the Schools since our inception and they are still out in schools doing exceptional work. We are persistent and unrelenting in wanting change and have been part of this dialogue for 20 years – the space is relatively young and small (although has grown significantly since those early years) and we have really been here from the start, establishing ourselves as a thought leader.

In addition to doing good work, as a non profit leader, I am tirelessly focused on the mission at large (ending chronic illness) and I steadily prioritize this larger mission over the benefit of my one organization. I demonstrate that by introducing a donor to another organization if I think they are more suited, or starting an initiative to partner with districts around the country as I know we are more powerful as a collective than as one organization. I have demonstrated that I cannot be distracted from the mission and that I am willing to support and partner with others to address a common goal. I move at the speed of trust, trusting as I go, as long as we are laser focused on the north star. We do not need to take the sole credit as we do not do this alone and our partners are critical to our success. I have remained consistent in this approach for 20 years and I do believe it has served our organization and my reputation well.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://wellnessintheschools.org/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wellnessintheschools/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WellnessintheSchools/
• Twitter: https://x.com/WITSinSchools

Image Credits

Photos courtesy of Wellness in the Schools