Share Our Strength, the leading organization working to end childhood hunger in America, subscribes to the above wise proverb. Through its cooking-based nutrition education program, Operation Frontline, low-income families learn how to prepare healthy, delicious meals on a limited budget -- ensuring that they have the knowledge, skills and resources they need for a lifetime of healthier eating.

Chef Joe Binder of Seattle, seen in the accompanying video, is one of hundreds of volunteers across the country helping to teach families how to cook. Through hands-on experience under the guidance of professional chefs like Binder, students learn how enjoyable and easy it is to create their own healthy, home-cooked meals. Classes include conversations around topics like how to stretch your dollars, keep food fresh and safe, pack more nutrition into family meals, and find the best healthy buys at the grocery store.

A real and lasting impact
Operation Frontline gives volunteers a chance to make a real and lasting impact in their communities by providing them with a proven program for sharing their expertise with families at risk of hunger. In addition to such key roles as chefs and nutrition instructors, volunteers can support Operation Frontline in other important capacities: serving as class assistants or class shoppers, or acting as financial planners, translators or even photojournalists.

"Before, I would run out of money for food every month, but the Side by Side class enabled me to budget differently so I don't run out anymore. It encouraged my son and me to really work together. ... Before, we wanted to get out of the store fast, but now we spend more time reading labels together and comparing prices," says a parent from Fort Worth, Texas, who participated in Operation Frontline's Side by Side course, in which parents and children learn together as partners.

Personal chef Monica Thomas, a volunteer instructor from Washington, D.C., finds her work with Operation Frontline fulfilling because she not only gets to share her culinary know-how with students, but she gets to introduce them to new experiences. "Some of these kids had never even tasted a raspberry before! The fact that we could give them an experience they'd never had before with food was very touching, and I found it tremendously fulfilling to know that I was helping expand someone's horizons."

She also learned to be creative in a new way with her cooking. "Operation Frontline's low-income participants can't afford 'fancy' ingredients that may seem commonplace to personal chefs like me. I enjoy the challenge of using basic, low-cost ingredients to teach others how to make food that's both healthy and delicious."

Operation Frontline offers its groundbreaking nutrition education programs through 22 nonprofit partnerships in 17 states and the District of Columbia, with plans to expand to 25 states over the next two years. Since 1993, Operation Frontline and its hundreds of volunteer instructors have conducted more than 5,000 nutrition and financial-planning courses, helping more than 59,000 low-income families in communities across the country learn how to eat better for less.