Healthy Kids, Healthy Forests is an innovative health and conservation program which incorporates a nutritious, delicious, native rainforest food into school lunch programs to foster economic prosperity, improve child health, ensure food security, restore rainforests, promote ecological integrity and mitigate climate change in Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean. Healthy Kids, Healthy Forests is a new paradigm of rural development which focuses on local and traditional food, skills, resources, and knowledge. We are the only organization in the world working to rescue the lost indigenous knowledge of the Maya Nut for food. This program is innovative because it adds value to a formerly worthless rainforest resource, also because it provides job, educational and income opportunities for women, a highly disenfranchised sector in Latin America. The school lunch model is also innovative and can provide a replicable model for other organizations hoping to mainstream traditional and perennial foods (which tend to be less popular but more nutritious and often more ecologically beneficial than "modern" annual food crops). The Maya Nut program has demonstrated positive and lasting impacts on:

• Rainforest conservation
• Reforestation
• Health and nutrition
• Food security
• Women’s incomes, self-esteem and status
• Maternal health and infant birth weights