What Happens to 23 Years of Knowledge When You Put It Online?
For more than two decades, much of Common Threads’ work happened in a familiar place: a kitchen. Children chopped and measured. Educators demonstrated. Families cooked together. Recipes became a way to talk about nutrition, culture and health. It was also a model with an obvious limitation: a chef educator can only be in one classroom at a time.
This September, Common Threads is testing a different way to extend that work. Our organization is expanding TEACH (Teaching Everyone About Cooking & Health), its digital learning platform, with self-paced certificate courses, and coming soon, digital Train-the-Trainer programs designed for educators, community health workers and other professionals. The technology isn’t really the interesting part. The harder question is whether 23 years of knowledge developed in classrooms, kitchens and communities can be translated into something useful for people Common Threads may never reach in person.
What 23 Years Produces
Common Threads has reached more than 1.2 million participants, including more than 687,000 students, and delivered more than 7.6 million hours of programming. Those numbers measure reach. They don’t fully measure what an organization learns along the way.
Common Threads’ programs have undergone 10 external evaluations, alongside ongoing internal evaluation and a formal continuous-improvement process. But another kind of knowledge accumulated as well: what instructors learned after teaching the same lesson repeatedly; which recipes children would actually try; what educators adapted; what families took home; and what didn’t work as expected. That knowledge is harder to put into a database. It is also some of the knowledge TEACH is intended to capture.
“Some of the most valuable things we’ve learned don’t live in a single curriculum,” said Linda Novick O’Keefe, Common Threads’ Founder and CEO. “They come from educators, families, evaluation and years of seeing what actually works.”
From Delivering Programs to Building Capacity
The expansion of TEACH starts with two self-paced certificate courses. Nutrition Fundamentals covers foundational nutrition knowledge and how it can be applied in classrooms, families and communities. Healthy Cooking Skills focuses on the practical side: giving learners the skills to translate nutrition information into food people can actually prepare. Both include newly produced instructional videos that increase accessibility and deepen content knowledge. But the more consequential part of the strategy may be Common Threads’ future digital Train-the-Trainer model.
Instead of Common Threads supplying every instructor, organizations can prepare their own educators and facilitators to implement programs using licensed Common Threads curriculum. That changes the basic equation. One instructor can teach one group. One trained organization can potentially reach many. It also shifts Common Threads’ role from delivering every program itself toward providing the knowledge, curriculum, and training infrastructure others can use.
The Test Is What Happens After Class
Common Threads has seen hints of what that can look like. At Don Haskins PK-8 in El Paso, Texas, the school’s initial Cooking Skills & World Cuisine offering generated enough interest that additional sessions were added. Programming eventually expanded to younger students and families. More telling was what school staff noticed outside the program. Some students began bringing healthier lunches and snacks they had prepared themselves. Parents reported children cooking at home. Lessons intended for one student traveled to parents, grandparents and siblings.
Chef Vivian, a Common Threads educator in the border community, saw cooking become a vehicle for something broader. “The kitchen became a classroom where children learned leadership, teamwork, cooperation, responsibility, communication and confidence,” she said. That is a harder outcome to reproduce on a screen. And it is precisely the challenge TEACH now has to address.
Building the Digital Version
Converting years of programming into online learning required more than uploading existing lesson plans. LaTrice Stirrup and Samantha Jones played central roles in developing the expanded platform, working through how Common Threads’ curriculum and accumulated experience could translate into a digital environment. Minna Sabbahi, Common Threads Registered Dietician, provided the nutritional content and reviewed for accuracy. The work included structuring the learning experience, developing content, and supporting the production of a new library of professional instructional videos during summer 2026.
“By offering these digital learning experiences, we have the opportunity to provide nutrition and cooking knowledge to a wide audience without the barriers of location and time.” Jones says. “Access to this kind of education can make all the difference to a parent, a classroom, and a whole community. It allows us to share our experience, not just our knowledge, in a way that is tangible and convenient.”
The distinction matters. A digital archive preserves material. A learning platform has to make that material useful to someone who wasn’t there when it was created. Stirrup and Jones helped bridge those two objectives, turning existing organizational knowledge into an experience intended to be used independently and at scale.
Before Launching, Letting Outsiders In: TEACH Launches September 15
We at Common Threads aren’t assuming that translation worked. Before the September 15th launch, the organization is giving a small group of outside reviewers from education, healthcare, public health and academia access to the platform. These experts include: Dr. Lisa Waddell, CEO of LFW Public Health Connections LLC, and former chief medical officer of the CDC Foundation; Jeremy Walter, executive director of Food and Climate Education at New York City Public Schools; Dr. Jaimie Davis, director of the School of Health and Human Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin; Kate MacKenzie, CEO Practice to Policy; and Dr. Pamela Koch, faculty director of the Laurie M. Tisch Center for Food, Education & Policy at Columbia University. They are being asked to spend several hours using it as actual learners would and assess the experience: How long does it take? Where does it drag? What is useful? What is missing? Who would actually use it? And in what setting? Their feedback will be incorporated before the public release. It is a relatively small test, but it reflects a practice Common Threads has used throughout its history: implement, evaluate, revise.
When Knowledge Travels
There is a broader question underneath TEACH. Nonprofits spend years developing curricula, training staff, building relationships and learning what works. Much of that knowledge can remain tied to the organization and the people who created it.
Digital learning offers another possibility: an educator in a school Common Threads has never entered could use it; a community health worker could adapt what she learns for a family; a health organization could train its own staff; a community organization could implement a curriculum without waiting for Common Threads to send an instructor. That is the bet behind the expanded TEACH. Not that technology can replace the kitchen. But some of what has been learned there can travel. And after 23 years, that may be the more important measure of scale.
