At the Academy of Culinary Nutrition, we teach our students to harness the power of food and create recipes that improve the health of their clients.

But sometimes, we also get to do something a little extra special: we use our recipes to heal the world.

In February, we released the 2016 edition of From Scratch Cooking, which is filled with plant-based, gluten-free recipes donated by our wonderfully creative culinary nutrition students and grads. 100% of the proceeds of From Scratch 2016 were given to Pencils of Promise, a non-profit that helps to build schools in Ghana, Guatemala and Laos.

In just two weeks we sold nearly 400 copies of the e-cookbook, and have raised over $12,400 ($9000 USD) – enough to send 360 children to school!

Your contributions have helped Pencils of Promise build schools for those who need them most, as well as fund programs that focus on teacher support, community health and student literacy. Some of these funding areas include:

• Teacher Support.  PoP provides teacher trainings and develops engaging materials for teachers to use in class. Teachers that receive PoP support see 3x higher test scores amongst their students.
• WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene). Students miss 272 million school days due to preventable illness. PoP builds bathrooms and hand-washing stations, and then trains students on proper hygiene and how that affects their health.
• Scholarships. Less than 60% of students in PoP-funded scholarships enroll in secondary school. With PoP scholarships, more children are given the chance at a great education. Each scholarship includes the cost of tuition, school material, lodging and transportation.

Thank you from the bottom of our hearts for being a part of From Scratch 2016. We are so incredibly fortunate to choose what we eat, where we work and how we live, and now these funds are giving people all over the world the same opportunities.

And the money keeps getting paid forward. For example, with last year’s e-cookbook we raised $4,800 to lend to Kiva. We started off with 35 projects – nearly 90% of our first loan recipients were women, and more than half were working in the food and agriculture sectors. Many of these loans have already been repaid and we’ve been able to subsequently lend more than $9,800 to borrowers all over the world!

Since we began publishing From Scratch Cooking in 2014, we have raised nearly $30,000 for charitable organizations, including Organics4Orphans, Charity:Water, Kiva and Pencils of Promise. So the next time you whip up a dish from your copy of From Scratch 2016, remember that culinary nutrition truly can help nourish the world – one recipe at a time. This project is proof that our global community can come together and create change for us all.