Staff Profile: Holly Waldkoetter

 

Holly Waldkoetter, nutritional coordinator, in the kitchen at New Hope Early Learning Center

Name: Holly Waldkoetter

Job title: Nutritional Coordinator (a.k.a. Chef)

New Hope employee since: July 2018

Favorite sport: Roller blading

Favorite pet: Kümmel is a gray cat. He eats a raw diet and his name means “caraway seeds” in German.

Favorite color: All pastels

Favorite activity when not cooking: Polaroid photography

Most rewarding aspect of her job: The people I work with and the purpose of my work. Everyone that works here respects everyone else, no matter the age gap. And I will always keep coming back to feed children.

You don’t need to sample her scones, or hear her wax poetic about Ellyn Satter’s “uplifting the mealtime experience,” to be inspired by Holly Waldkoetter, New Hope’s chef and nutritional coordinator.

Equipped with a wide smile and infectious enthusiasm, Holly prepares and delivers more than 900 meals and healthy snacks every week to the lucky children enrolled at New Hope Early Learning Center.

Holly’s role at New Hope grew as organically as the vegetables in a Community Supported Agriculture garden plot. A chance encounter with Emily Pike in a psychology class was the seed that sprouted into a year-long unofficial internship at New Hope in 2017. Her employment in the kitchen of The Nest at New Hope (now New Hope Early Learning Center) began on a part-time basis in July of 2018 and blossomed into full-time work during the pandemic.

New Hope’s early childhood care and education program, which prioritizes children impacted by homelessness, immediately proved to be a stimulating work environment for Holly.

“You could feel everyone’s energy all at once,” recalled Holly. “Everyone would mentor you. Kate Gehring would help me with things and Amie Stringer would help me with things, and then Emily would walk through and help me with things. Having access to everybody's brains baked all of the information about child care and homelessness that I didn't have yet.”

In her additional role as manager of the food pantry at New Hope, Holly is in a unique position to intervene when a child might not be getting their nutritional needs met at home.

“We're able to identify which kids are dealing with food insecurity,” she explained. “It is always a very open and kind and respectful conversation, and it always benefits the kid. That happens in every classroom and every week. New Hope helps them fill that gap.”

Holly completed her self-designed degree in Food Justice from Indiana University and was selected the 2018 recipient of IU’s Richard D. Young Award. Named for the founding director of IU’s Individualized Major Program, the Richard D. Young Award is given annually to the student whose combination of academic excellence and civic engagement exemplifies the ideals the program exists to nurture.

During New Hope’s early years, Holly worked with her colleagues to develop a unique garden-focused curriculum they named “Plot to Tot,” bringing young children into the garden and enabling them to experience the pleasure of growing their own food. More recently, she designed an all-ages coloring book titled Coloring in Recovery: Mantras for Eating Disorder Recovery.

Holly always seems up for a challenge, but how difficult has it been to scale up her food service from 16 (the old enrollment at The Nest) to 48 children (the capacity of New Hope Early Learning Center)?

“It was a really hard adjustment,” admits Holly. “I was full-time doing cooking in the first place and then we just shifted to 48 kids!”

And what advice does she have for parents when children aren’t interested in the food you are serving?

“The best thing to do is to let them decide. Ellyn Satter is probably the leading child food psychologist and she presented this division of labor in child eating and feeding. The parent decides what to eat and when to eat and the child decides if they eat and how much they eat. When those lines are blurred, personal and contentious disagreements about food at meal times will happen.”

“If I give you a roll and a cucumber and you tell me you don't want to eat the cucumber, and I start screaming at you to eat it, then we're gonna have a conflict for a good while after that. And you may never like cucumbers again. Food experiences for children are so much more impactful and momentous than they seem. Anytime you can give a child joy and choice, you have done a great, great service to them in preventing any type of disorder, because disorder is rooted in restriction in deciding what you can and can't have.”

Thank you, Holly, for your food and inspiration. And congratulations on five years of service to the children at New Hope!

 
New Hope for Families