It was at her first job at a New York City hospital that Alexandra DeSorbo-Quinn ’07 realized the power of a creative teaching model. She was working on a program the hospital had created in partnership with hip-hop artist Doug E. Fresh called Hip-Hop Stroke, which used hip-hop music and culture to teach kids the silent signs of stroke.
“First of all, kids were learning about stroke; second, they were retaining it over time; and third, they were sharing it with their families,” DeSorbo-Quinn says. “We decided, there’s something here. We can teach anything through hip-hop.”
DeSorbo-Quinn was introduced to the idea of a career in public health at Bryn Mawr during a medical anthropology course with Professor Melissa Pashigian. She went straight to the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health for her master’s in epidemiology, then to the job in the hospital stroke department.
When DeSorbo-Quinn and her husband, Tom Quinn, HC ’06, moved to Chicago and she started looking for a new job, a posting from some chefs seeking an executive director for their fledgling organization, Pilot Light, caught her eye.
“Food and music are very similar in the sense that they are these great connectors,” she says. “I could see the potential.”
Pilot Light was started in 2010 by a group of Chicago chefs who were inspired by First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” initiative. One of them, Matthias Merges, approached his daughter’s school about opportunities to bring food into the classroom.
“We decided to descend on this school for one day, teach classes, and cook the kids lunch,” says founding chef Jason Hammel, owner of Lula Café in Chicago.
When DeSorbo-Quinn started at Pilot Light in 2014, the organization was so small that her first task was to set up her own payroll. The next was to expand into more schools.
“The energy Alex gives off makes you want to be part of Pilot Light.”
DeSorbo-Quinn thought back to the assemblies she had been to for Hip-Hop Stroke, how teachers would drop the kids off in the auditorium. They got a break but missed an opportunity to connect with the learning. The key to Pilot Light’s mission, she thought, was engaging the teachers.
“Alex is a strong team-builder, and that’s apparent in the number of different programs we have,” Hammel says. “She brings people in and gives them the space to run with an idea. Looking at what we had as an idea that was wild and untamed, and taking that and turning it into an actual program that could be built and resourced. . . it was all her doing.”
Pilot Light developed Food Education Standards, which were built into competencies for different grade levels. The organization has a digital library of more than 140 lessons and resources teachers can use or customize to fit their needs. Pilot Light also started a fellowship program to support teachers in developing curricula for their classes.
DeSorbo-Quinn “has more connections than anyone I’ve ever met, and she’s always willing to say, ‘How can I help you?’” says Brian Greene, a botany and culinary arts teacher at John Lewis Middle School in Waukegan, Illinois, and former fellow. “The energy Alex gives off makes you want to be part of Pilot Light.”
Examples of lessons that teachers have adopted from or adapted with Pilot Light include investigating the sources and origins of Chicago hot dog toppings, teaching ratios by scaling recipes, having kids write poems inspired by food, and partnering with a nearby pumpkin patch to learn about farming.
Alexandra DeSorbo-Quinn at John Lewis Middle School in Waukegan, Illinois, with Pilot Light teacher Brian Greene’s botany and culinary arts class. Photo by Dominic DiPalermo.
One of Hammel’s favorite lessons takes tacos al pastor — a beloved staple of Mexican cuisine — and teaches how it was influenced by cooking practices such as Lebanese spit-roasting.
“They’re teaching through food in math and science and social studies — really any subject,” DeSorbo-Quinn says. “But at the same time, they are teaching about food and the food system, about the impacts of your choices on the planet, on your body, on your community, and how food connects to your culture, your identity, your history.”
By the 2014–2015 school year, the program had expanded to five more Chicago schools. They quickly learned, DeSorbo-Quinn says, how food access and culture varied in specific schools across different neighborhoods. A Pilot Light program called SnackTime Explorers was developed to give teachers ideas for how to use produce provided by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program for low-income schools.
Greene is lucky enough to have a greenhouse and 52 raised beds at his school, all funded by a nearby pharmaceutical company, despite being in a high-poverty district.
“Flamin’ Hot Cheetos are the number one, go-to food,” he says. Introducing his students to the process of growing, harvesting, and cooking food in the on-site kitchen has been transformative, he says. “Last year I had 12 kids in the class who had never had broccoli, and now they can cook broccoli for you four different ways.”
“It’s food. It’s something all of them share and they all connect with.”
Chandra Garcia-Kitch, an eighth-grade teacher at Josephine Locke Elementary School, started using Pilot Light’s curriculum in a previous job at a parent’s request. From 2019 to 2020, she participated in the Pilot Light Fellowship, which provides additional training and curriculum development for teachers. She thinks of Pilot Light less like a class, she says, and more like a supplement, “something that makes the curriculum come alive.”
“Any time I said, ‘Pilot Light,’ there was not one kid that was like, ugh,” Garcia-Kitch says. “All of a sudden, all of these concepts that they found difficult when it was in reading or math, it just clicked for them because it was something they were super excited about but also something they could directly apply in a tactile, visual, kinesthetic way.”
One of Garcia-Kitch’s favorites is “the bread lesson,” which teaches kids about immigration and different cultures’ breads. She later adapted the lesson for a fifth-grade class, using yeast and water to teach about chemical change.
Pilot Light has resisted being pigeonholed as a culinary or nutrition education organization, even as it has been affected by changing food policy in the United States, such as funding cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program known as SNAP, and the discontinuation of its educational component, SNAP-Ed.
“A lot of our peers have had their budgets decimated,” DeSorbo-Quinn says. “Some have closed their doors; some are finding new ways to do their work in this new space and trying to stay afloat.”
At the same time, she points out, the “MAHA” movement, championed by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., secretary of health and human services, has created a national conversation about food and nutrition.
DeSorbo-Quinn and her colleagues are working to diversify revenue and stay focused on what they consider key: the teachers. Pilot Light is now used by hundreds of teachers across 26 states.
The lessons improve critical thinking skills, Hammel says. Garcia-Kitch points to the social and emotional learning aspect, how she finds it makes the kids more compassionate toward one another.
It also, she adds, makes them more adventurous and willing to try new things.
At the end of the day, kids get excited about Pilot Light because “it’s food,” Garcia-Kitch says. “It’s something all of them share and they all connect with.”
Dining and Cooking