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Lyn’s role as the Good Food Network VISTA is to aid the organization in creating a centralized resource of all organizations involved in addressing food security in Washington State. This will help in not only getting these organizations to collaborate, but can help others in finding food security resources near them.

Adjusting to the remote workflow of Seattle Good, Lyn Tampi has been learning more about the organization’s programs, including Good Food Kitchens. The Good Food Kitchens program works together with local producers and distributors, restaurants and community kitchens, and community organizations to provide nutritious meals to those who need it the most. This program has been going on for the past five years or so, with thousands of meals being delivered to people in need. While most of the meals have been tracked accordingly, there is some information to clean up and the program’s information is in various places.

For the past two months, Lyn has been working on cleaning up and compiling the information all into one google sheet and checking through partner invoices, farmer invoices, and the meal tracking documents to ensure that the information is consistent as it goes into one document. She has been checking in with her supervisor, Mariah DeLeo to ensure that the information is correct, as well as how to best organize the information.

After compiling the meal tracking information of the past five years, Lyn will start reaching out to some of the community organizations involved in the Good Food Kitchens program to potentially volunteer with them to not only help with giving out meals but to get feedback on the meals from the recipients- to ensure that the meals are nutritious and culturally relevant to those who are receiving them.

There’s still quite a lot of information to gather and organize on the google sheet but the anticipation of doing something new is exciting for Lyn. She’s hoping to gain more hands-on experience within food systems rather than only sitting at a computer and looking at numbers. To Lyn, she acknowledges the importance of tracking information and other behind-the-scenes work, but she understands how much impact there can be in being able to interact with others, especially in food systems and food security.