The following is an original production of AZPM News.

(Tom) This week on Arizona Illustrated, the Tucson Family Food Project is going to teach me how to make a special dish.

(Steven) They get out of school, they pick up their meal kit and then they go home and they cook dinner for the family.

(Tom) See how art is being used as a tool for public health.

(Theresa) We needed to think of creative ways in which the arts be part of the solution.

(Tom) The Perry's Penstemon offers up more than just pretty flowers.

(Adam) One of the other reasons why I like the Perry Penstemon is it requires very little landscape management.

(Tom) And I'll sit down with Tucson Electric Power CEO Susan Gray to kick off our new series, Speaking Personally.

Hello and welcome to Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara joining you from the test kitchens of the Tucson Family Food Project and its executive director, Steven Cota-Robles, who's invited us in today.

We're going to be learning a lot about your organization, which is fascinating.

But in the meantime, you and I are going to make a mess.

(Steven) Yeah, yeah, wait.

We'll try to keep it clean.

(Tom) Yeah, we're going to cook up something, Steven.

(Steven) Yeah, today we're going to be making our veggie stir fry with white rice.

We first rolled this recipe out to the kids about a month ago and it was a huge hit.

And this is like a really cool recipe because we're making vegetables delicious.

(Tom) Yeah, and that's what this program is all about, the kids teaching kids how to cook, helping out their families in the process.

You're a pretty good cook yourself.

I get hit and miss.

But that's the message to the kids too, is you know the kitchen is kind of a safe space to struggle.

And you know, you don't really You just try again.

(Tom) So we'll whip this up as the show goes along.

But first, you know, we're going to learn a little bit more about the program.

Here's a look at the project and how it's helping to tackle childhood food insecurity.

(Steven) What's up TTFF people and welcome to the Tucson Family Food Project.

I am so excited for this week's recipe.

I'm 50% Julia Child where I'm teaching them how to cook and I'm 50% Mr.

Rogers because it's like all love to the kids.

This week we're making a classic recipe that is absolutely essential for any home chef to know The Tucson Family Food Project is a non-profit that fights childhood food insecurity but we do it in a totally unique way.

If you haven't noticed we use a lot of zucchini and that's because it's an incredibly versatile, low calorie and nutrient dense food.

But today we're going to use it to make veggie enchilada casserole So let's get cooking.

I had an epiphany and I was like I have nieces and nephews that are on YouTube all the time and I was fortunate enough to take home ec in middle school and I was like "why can't we teach home ec to kids in their own homes through YouTube?"

We make one extra meal kit every single week and I teach the kids step by step that recipe that is in front of them here is exactly how you put it together for yourself.

The core concept of the program is the saying give a man a fish feed him for a day, teach him to fish, feed him for the rest of his life.

And the idea is that instead of just handing out food we're actually building life skills and we're teaching kids resilience.

And then it's going to go into the oven for 35 to 45 minutes.

The big why behind this is all of the detrimental effects kids suffer in school when they don't get enough to eat.

And the reality is that that food insecurity when they come out of school it's going to really limit the kind of jobs they can apply for and it leads them into poverty.

And one of the only things we know for sure is poverty creates food insecurity and it's this vicious cycle and it's really really hard to break.

And the big underlying why of the Tucson Family Food Project is that because it's a fixable problem.

So there it is, vegetable enchilada casserole certified delicious.

[KITCHEN CLATTER] Generally on Monday I figure out what the recipe we're going to do is.

I figure out the ingredients that we can procure and we'll put together a master ingredient list We'll figure out everything that we need, the quantities that we need to either provide for our volunteers to portion out or we just need to go out and buy.

So it looks different every week depending on what the recipe is.

So on Tuesday and Wednesday the volunteers do all of the prep work.

(Sandy) Today I was shopping at zucchini and also onions.

I've been doing volunteer at different places and we're just like the head people just watch over you.

Everybody works together for the good.

You know everybody participates.

(Steven) On Wednesday and Thursday I film and edit the video and then on Friday that video gets posted first thing in the morning and then on Friday we all meet here again and the volunteers assemble the meal kits.

We load them all into insulated bags and onto our refrigerated delivery truck and then on Friday after we pack them they all get delivered to the schools.

-What's up Longhorns?

(Kids) -Morning!

-Good Morning!

They get out of school, they pick up their meal kit and then they go home and they cook dinner for the family.

It's like a dinner a week the family doesn't have to worry about.

It's free.

The recipes are designed around that to use just these very simple things that the kids should already have at home and if they're missing that stuff we do collection events around town and we'll actually collect pots and pans from the public and give them to the kids who need them.

When I started I had a group of seven volunteers and now we're up to, gosh I think at last count we are just above north of 60 volunteers that we use every week.

It just brings in good people and honestly it's one of those things that kind of like refreshed my faith in humanity.

(Sandy) Steve came to our HOA and told us about it and I was like to give back and do some volunteer, I'm retired And when he told us about this it just resonated with me.

You're teaching them how to do something instead of just giving them cans of foods or something like that.

You're actually teaching them how to make a dinner because we have different spices and stuff like that.

So they learn different ingredients and how to eat healthier not just snacks and just something convenient foods how you can put together a meal.

(Steven) We took these really sustainable steps starting with just 20 kids a week that I was feeding out of my own home kitchen.

So now that we're up to 260 kids we're hearing from teachers that they're seeing behavior changes in the kids in as little as two weeks of the start of the program and that those behavior changes are manifesting themselves in kids raising their hand and finding their voice and building their confidence.

We hear it from the kids that they love doing it that you know they look forward to going home and cooking for their family and they find this sense of accomplishment.

In June of 2026 we leased out two buildings from Tucson Unified School District.

Each building is about 3,500 square feet.

One of them we have already converted into our admin space, so that's where we film the YouTube videos now and then the other 3,500 square foot building is basically just a big shell and we're turning this 3,500 square foot building into a large-scale production kitchen So we're going away from you know volunteers and cutting boards to pieces of equipment that can produce hundreds of pounds of vegetables an hour like big big stuff.

So our volunteering program will kind of change to learn how to use this equipment but the long-term goal of this program is to do exactly what we're doing and utilize closed schools.

There's about 8,000 closed schools estimated in the country right now.

They have existing infrastructure we can retrofit and we can adapt that to what we need to produce food and the idea is that once we figure out how to do this in Tucson that's the template and now we can grow it wherever we can.

I love, appreciate, and respect all of you and I will see you right back here next week with another delicious recipe.

So until then, peace!

So the first thing we're going to do is make our sauce.

So this is exactly what the kids get at home and this is exactly what they see on the YouTube video.

These are ingredients for our sauce.

So we've got some soy sauce some toasted sesame oil, brown sugar, cornstarch, garlic, rice vinegar, and ginger.

We're just going to pour all of these into our bowls.

And then we're going to use a fork to whisk all of this up.

And our goal is these little clumps of cornstarch.

We just want to break all of those up.

(Tom) Yeah, it seems that I'm stirring differently than you.

(Steven) So what I would do, I use the tongs or the prongs of the fork to actually whisk.

(Tom) Well, next we're going to show you how a local arts initiative has become a tool for public health and it's helping residents on a path toward healing.

(Sadie) Well, welcome to the third meeting of Salud Arte.

This big station over here is the memory map station.

These aren't all encompassing, but we tried to get as much areas of Tucson as we could.

Our communities are our biggest asset.

Art and health initiatives are becoming an emerging best practice in Pima County.

Go off the cuff and talk more about your experiences.

(Elizabeth) I have some biases as an artist, as to what art can do with what may be perceived as controversial subjects.

Art gives us a way into the conversation.

(Theresa) You know when they build a road?

they say 1% of the road should go to public art?

Well, I believe that 1% of public health funding, at least 1% should go to public art.

Public art so embodies what it means to help heal.

So we created this vision that became SaludArte.

(Adriane) In thinking through how might we do this, especially as a public health institution, was thinking through who should we partner with to really steward this work.

And so I reached out to Adriana Gallego, the executive director of the Arts Foundation for Tucson in Southern Arizona, fomenting what ended up being like a really, really solid partnership, that allowed us to create this beautiful public offering.

The arts alone will not resolve society's issues, but society's issues will not be resolved without the arts.

This was a situation where we could build a bridge between community members, between government, and between arts and culture.

So that together we could tell a story of resilience, we could tell a story in memoriam of the losses that we endured, and we can tell a story about hope in the future.

(Theresa) With SaludArte, what we ended up doing was working with the five different superintendent's areas in Pima County.

♪ UPBEAT GUITAR ♪ Art is not a typical fund from either Health and Human Services, or for the Center of Disease Control.

We had to convince them that art mattered.

(Adriane) We decided to pair longitudinal COVID-19 data with data called the Social Vulnerability Index.

And it looks at underserved communities and how are they impacted by access to health resources, to health insurance, again, to employment, to education.

What are all of these different social factors that go into making people more or less vulnerable?

(Theresa) We also were really focused on this concept of human centered design, that we would ensure that the community itself was engaged in figuring out what art they thought would matter to their community, working with the artist during the time period to create that art, and then be there at the time when the art was revealed.

(Sadie) I worked with the Pima County Health Department team to identify the locations that we were going to be working in.

Once we did find the zip codes that experienced the greatest loss and were the most under-resourced across Pima County, I went to each of those communities.

From there, I did outreach, looking for at least 15 folks who would like to join in the program.

From managing the program, I've seen how transformative it can be with communities.

I'm also managing the next iteration of SaludArte.

For this iteration, we're focusing on substance use.

(Brian) The project is funded by the Overdose Data to Action Grant, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

That's a five year grant.

So, that's gonna go for another three years from now.

We plan to continue funding artwork as a part of that project.

(Adriana) We needed to think of creative ways in which the arts be part of the solution.

(Elizabeth) We're inviting people with living, and lived experience of drug use, of recovery, of well-being, of being on a journey to well-being to share different parts of their story.

(Annalie) Around Windows downtown, we're putting up vinyl stickers of quotes people have about recovery or about what they would tell their past selves, if they could.

And as you walk by it, there are QR codes that you can go to, and listen to what the person fully said.

(Elizabeth) You know, there's a tradition of socially engaged art, that the things that are made are the product of the process of bringing people together, rather than the product of an artist producing in the studio.

By the end of this project, so many community members, it sparked in them a desire to become more civically engaged.

And we know in public health, the more civically engaged individuals and communities are, the healthier they are.

♪ UPLIFTING PIANO ♪ (Marianna) The Tucson Museum of Art is displaying the process product of Elizabeth Burden's installation.

So, after working with the Arts Foundation, and working with the Pima County Health Department, parts of the project that is documented, as well as final artistic end products, are on view.

Dealing with this idea of addiction and de-stigmatizing substance use, we're seeing an opportunity to act local, but with a topic that impacts a global spectrum.

(Brian) At the table here tonight, we've got a box full of wooden butterflies that have names and dates on them.

And those are all names and dates of people from our community who have been lost to overdose.

And at the end of this OD2A project, that's gonna be part of a larger artwork that's gonna be an installation.

So, that was one of the beginning phases for understanding this connection of art, and especially as it pertained to healing.

(Elizabeth) The idea of planting a seed resonates for this particular project.

There is a saying among persons in recovery that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, it's connection.

(Brian) The actual space itself, the recovery living room, a place where you're just in communion with another human being, but just by sitting down with someone, breaking bread, drinking water, eating food, and having a conversation about life, like these barriers start to disappear and it creates this immense sense of hope and connectivity.

There's been lots of interactions that we've had with people from our community that have lost someone.

And when someone comes up to you and says, I've never had opportunity to express this loss before, because I've never been able to talk about it, because there's been so much stigma about it, to give them an opportunity to heal and to start that journey of recovery has been really meaningful work.

Our real goal was to say, and this is a quote I actually took from what someone wrote at one of those celebrations, is that all healing is possible.

And that became a guiding star for us that our work with and of the community was really to help give people another venue to heal.

(Steven) Okay, so now we are going to start on our veggies.

So now we're just going to stir this up just a little bit.

I like grabbing the pan to give you a little bit of sense of control.

And right now all we're trying to do is mix it up so that every vegetable touches that oil.

(Tom) It's so healthy looking and smelling.

It smells great, right?

(Steven) You don't have to do too much to this stuff.

I like it.

It looks pretty dang close to mine.

I don't think we can tell the difference between the two.

(Tom) My producer is skeptical, but you say I'm doing fine.

Alright.

I'll take it from you, Steven.

You know, the Sonoran Desert has thousands of plants that can thrive in your yard, be good for wildlife, and save you some water.

Here's a colorful species that can also attract some hummingbirds.

♪ SOFT GUITAR MUSIC ♪ (Adam) My name is Adam Ferrell-Wartman.

I'm the director of horticulture here at the Tucson Botanical Gardens.

This is "Penstemon Parryi" or "Parry's Penstemon" is its common name.

It's the most common penstemon you'll find in the Tucson Valley.

It is a hummingbird specialist plant.

So hummingbirds love flowers that have this tubular growth on it here.

It's going to be one of the earlier bloomers for the desert.

So a lot of our snowbirds that are only here through the early spring, this will be a plant that will be blooming for you before you leave town.

It's just such a dependable species.

I also really love the color of the leaves.

When it's a little chilly out, it gets the red blush on the stem and the purple hue, especially the new growth.

♪ GENTLE GUITAR MUSIC ♪ This plant is a short lived perennial, meaning it lives for somewhere between two to four years.

This one in front of me here is a pretty well established one and it could actually probably be the last year of its lifespan.

Every single flower here will produce a seed cluster.

This plant readily reseeds into your yard or the environment.

The other nice thing is when it does put on its seed, the finches come and eat from it as well.

So it's a multi-stage bird plant.

It's a cold hardy plant, so it's hardy to about 20 degrees.

It gets a little less hardy if it's already blooming.

It's so drought tolerant that it might look like it dies completely.

It can disappear in the summer all the way down to the ground.

But as soon as the weather cools off and we- if we get winter rain, it'll sprout back up.

If you want it in your landscape and you want it to be evergreen, it takes additional water in the summertime.

We hear a lot of people want a nice wildflower space, but they have a hard time establishing those wildflowers.

Parry's Penstemon is one of the go-to's for that.

One of the other reasons why I like the Parry's Penstemon is it requires very little landscape management.

The only thing you need to do is the end of its blooming season.

If you want it to reseed, you leave the flower stock to set its seed, and then you'll get a few thousand seeds in it.

And then at the end of the season when the seeds have all dried up and been dispersed, all you have to do is snap it off by hand, and you've done your spring cleaning.

(Steven) Now we are just going to put in this really delicious sauce.

We'll give it a little mix, and then we'll just pour that directly in.

Then we're going to stir this, and same concept that we wanted all the veggies to touch the oil, we want all the veggies to touch the sauce now.

We're going to give this probably three to five minutes for that sauce to reduce and concentrate and flavor.

(Tom) Next, we're bringing you a brand new series, Speaking Personally, where we'll sit down with people who are having an impact in Arizona and around the country.

We'll go beyond the headlines to find out who they really are, what makes them tick, how they got to where they are.

First up is Susan Gray, Tucson Electric Power's first female CEO.

You were quoted as saying, "I grew up with people pouring confidence into me."

What's that like?

(Susan) Yeah, my parents were amazing.

They really convinced me I could do whatever I wanted to do.

I had no inhibitions really.

They maybe tried to shape where I was headed, but just really, I was a swimmer, and they were like, "Oh, you probably make the Olympics."

(Tom) Okay.

(Susan) And just kind of sky's the limit on whatever you want to try.

I'm sure you'll be successful, and we're here to support you to do it.

(Tom) Did you believe that right away, or did it take you a while to believe what they were telling you?

(Susan) I would say I believed it because it started before I could really think about it.

And then as you get older, you start to question, but yeah, from the beginning, I was like, "I'm supergirl."

(Tom) You walked into TEP in '94 for an internship.

Your world and your life, your career certainly changed.

(Susan) I was looking for, you know, just a summer job and my dad's like, hey, why don't you check out Tucson Electric Power?

And a friend of his worked at the company and so, you know, just, oh yeah, go see if there were any openings and sure enough, got an interview and was invited to stay for the summer.

And then that just kind of kept, I at one point was the only intern in the company.

They let all the interns go and for whatever reason, I got to stay.

(Tom) You were once known as "the girl" at TEP.

What was it like being "the girl"?

(Susan) Yeah, so I was invited by the Vice President of Operations after I finished my MBA at University of Arizona.

Hey, will you come do a six month rotation in operations?

And I was like, yeah, that sounds interesting.

And after six months, I begged him to let me stay.

So here I am with all these linemen, you know, all the folks that work out in the field are mostly men.

And they started calling me "the girl" because I was the only female supervisor in that group.

But I loved it, I loved being a little bit different, (Tom) You're a big proponent of women in STEM, women in leadership and all.

How are you going about that and making yourself as a model of success and solidity known to all these young women out there?

(Susan) You know, I'm so fortunate to have had some really great mentors, both female and male mentors in my life.

And I feel like it's my responsibility to do the same.

And then to me too, investing in women is important because not everyone has had the same experience that I've had.

I had some great mentors.

I had some people within the company who saw something in me and were willing to be that trusted advisor for me.

And I wanna do that personally as I invest in women that I mentor, but also more collectively.

So we've started a women in energy group at Tucson Electric.

I co-founded it with our CFO, who was a man.

It's important for men to support women in their leadership development as well.

(Tom) Be sure to watch my full interview with Susan Gray on YouTube or listen to it on our new Speaking Personally podcast.

For more information, go to azpm.org/speakingpersonally.

(Steven) Cool alright.

We're ready to plate.

So we're just going to do a small bowl here.

I'm going to take a nice big scoop of this white basmati rice that we prepped.

Same thing here.

We're just going to get a nice big scoop.

Put this on the rice.

We're going to put on some diced green onion as well as some sesame seeds to try this out.

(Tom) No objection here.

I'll eat that all day.

(Steven) You see how quick that is?

We tell the kids it doesn't need to look good for Instagram and stuff like that.

But the reality is it's very simple.

When you do little things like the green onions and the sesame seeds, it takes it to that next level and it makes the kids look like, "Oh man, we just made a professional style dish."

-You're a five-star kid cook.

-Yeah, exactly.

(Tom) Nice.

All right, Steven.

The room smells great.

Our work looks great.

The piez de resistance.

Let's try it out.

(Steven) Moment of truth.

Here we go.

It's healthy on top of all of that.

(Steven) Exactly.

(Tom) I have to dig again.

That really is good.

- Isn't that good?

(Tom) Yeah, the sauce makes it.

Steven, that is great.

It's delicious.

It's healthy and I'm going to bring some home.

That's okay.

(Steven) We've got some to-go ready for you.

(Tom) I'll cook for my family and they'll be proud of me.

-I love that.

(Tom) Congrats on what you're doing for the kids and for the community at Oz.

- Thank you so much.

- Thank you.

Thank you for watching Arizona Illustrated on behalf of Steven.

I'm Tom McNamara.

We will see you again next week.