Inspiring Conversations with Steven Cota-Robles of The Tucson Family Food Project

Today we’d like to introduce you to Steven Cota-Robles.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I was one of those people you hear about when people talk about the “Great Resignation” following covid. I had been working for the same company for almost 15 years and I realized that time is just so valuable, I’d rather be spending it doing something I’m passionate about. I knew that I wanted to utilize my skills and knowledge of the food industry to help my community, but I wasn’t sure how until I talked to some friends who are teachers.

They explained to me what food insecurity and hunger look like in our schools in real life, and it was heartbreaking. With that information, I started on my business plan for launching The Tucson Family Food Project – a nonprofit organization that would not only provide food to kids but teaches them skills they need to cook meals for themselves at home. In the Spring of 2021, I sold my house to fund the organization, put in my two weeks’ notice at work, and The Tucson Family Food Project was born.

We launched our program in one school in 2021 feeding 20 families per week. I’m incredibly happy and proud to say that we ended 2022 collaborating with three schools, and are now feeding 103 families every single week! The response from the community, the teachers, the parents, and most importantly the students, has been tremendous. We are currently working with partnering with some of Tucson’s most in-need schools and we are currently projecting adding 300 families to our program in 2023!

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
As someone who’s never started a company before, or ever worked in the nonprofit sector for that matter, it’s been quite a learning experience for me. While we’ve had our fair share of challenges along the way, being persistent, adaptable, and having a clear vision of our long-term goals has turned obstacles into speed bumps instead of mountains.

Any business takes time to get a foothold in the community, and nonprofits can take even longer. The best advice I can give would be to keep your expectations realistic, celebrate your victories, learn from your mistakes instead of dwelling on them, and be able to adapt quickly.

As you know, we’re big fans of The Tucson Family Food Project. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
The Tucson Family Food Project is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) that is focused on fighting childhood food insecurity by providing the kids in our program with not just food, but the skills and ability to make food for themselves at home. We do this by providing meal kits that the kids take home every weekend. We do this because so many children use school as their primary source of nutrition and often go hungry on the weekends when free school lunch is unavailable.

What makes us unique is that the meal kits are given to the kids raw and they learn how to cook and assemble the recipes themselves at home. We have a weekly YouTube video that shows the kids exactly how to cook that week’s recipe and detailed instruction cards for children who might not have internet access outside of the classroom.

Childhood food insecurity is a HUGE problem, and its effects on kids can be devastating. Of course, lack of food has consequences that are felt by the body, but it also affects a child’s cognitive ability. We can’t expect a child to sit still, behave, and absorb the material if their brain isn’t getting the nutrition it needs. It’s physiologically impossible.

And because of this, children who suffer from food insecurity are more likely to be suspended, be held back a grade, have higher absence rates, and perform worse on standardized testing. Food insecurity affects a child’s education so much that it will limit the types of jobs they’ll be able to apply for later on in life. And studies have shown that children who suffer from food insecurity will go on to make less money in their lifetimes than kids who didn’t.

The Tucson Family Food Project doesn’t just want to feed these kids, we want to give them the ability to feed themselves. By teaching them an incredibly valuable life skill, we are giving them something that they can use throughout their lives to fight food insecurity and give themselves their best chance of living a happy and healthy life. Our long-term goal, however, is to help the next generation come out of school prepared to enter the modern workforce and be ready to tackle whatever the world throws at them.

How do you define success?
Success is like a fingerprint, it’s different for everyone. What looks like success to me might look like abject failure to someone else and vice versa. I think the key to success is knowing how to be at peace with your ambitions and goals and giving them ample time to develop. Success can be a metric or goal that you set for yourself, or it can simply be being happy at the end of every day. I tend to lean toward the latter.

Contact Info:

• Website: TTFFP.org
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thetucsonfamilyfoodproject/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsZscmrHFPTBwP4pJ1cr6mw