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Evolved Network Turns Farm-to-Table Into Empowerment for Chicago Kids
Non-profit Brings Gardening, Cooking and Therapy to Underprivileged Students
Sebastian White began a recent webinar about The Evolved Network with a disclaimer. “Tonight is not a pitch,” the Chicago chef and non-profit organization founder told the attendees. “It’s meant to be a conversation.” He wanted participants to leave knowing not just what the organization does, but why.
The “why” starts with his earlier career. Before he was a self-taught chef, Sebastian was a psychotherapist who worked with gang-involved and at-risk middle school students in Waukegan. In spring 2020, his father and his aunt — both of whom had strong positive impacts on his life — died within a short time of each other, and he decided to turn his grief into a program for encouraging and empowering unprivileged youths.
“I tell the kids all the time, human emotions are real,” Sebastian said. “Anger is a real human emotion. It’s not something that you need to get rid of, but how you choose to engage in that is a really important part of the puzzle.”
The result was The Evolved Network, which received its 501(c)(3) status in January 2021. Its premise is that the farm-to-table process is inherently therapeutic. Students plant a seed and watch it grow, and the garden becomes a set of metaphors they can live through.
Soil quality stands in for the circumstances a person grows up in, rain for love and care, sunlight for attention. In the kitchen, they learn what happens when an ingredient they feared or disliked becomes part of something good.
“Food can be healthy and food can be nutritious,” Sebastian said, “but it can also be so much more.”
Not a Cooking Class or Chef Pipeline
Sebastian is emphatic about what the program is not. It is not nutrition education, and it is not intended to produce more chefs or farmers (though that is a possible outcome).
“I am truly looking at this from a therapeutic aspect,” he said. To him, therapy doesn’t mean telling someone how to be. It means helping a person understand how they navigate the world and then asking whether that’s how they want to. “That’s where freedom takes its place,” he said, “and that’s what’s owed to every human being: the opportunity to live within the freedom and truly have to embrace the agony and beauty of choice.”
In practice, that means disrupting assumptions. Kids arrive certain about what they will and won’t like. Sebastian calls it their “box of safety,” and he asks how they might fit more into it.
Often the lesson arrives without his saying anything: a student who swears off vegetables finishes a plate of them. “It pulls a rug out from underneath them,” he said, “and it forces them to choose how to move forward.”
Where The Evolved Network Works
This school year, The Evolved Network will serve more than 850 students at Chicago Jesuit Academy in the city’s Austin neighborhood; National Teachers Academy in the South Loop; William Ray Elementary in Hyde Park; Carnegie Elementary in Woodlawn, in partnership with Experimental Station, a non-profit that is heavily devoted to reducing food insecurity; and the Academy for Global Citizenship in the Garfield Ridge community near Midway Airport on the Southwest Side.
Sebastian said an agreement with Hope Elementary in Austin was being finalized.
He said the aim is to be embedded in each school community rather than a service provider that comes and goes. He is also candid with principals about money. With many Chicago Public Schools facing budget cuts, he tells them he isn’t “here to take all your money,” but that “a little bit of skin in the game keeps you invested.”
Donors, he said, cover the gap so the organization can show up “unconditionally.”
Program Menu
The Table Project is the culinary curriculum. Sebastian brings ingredients for a seasonal dish with no written recipe, and the students help him build it from scratch. They don’t measure unless they’re baking. One favorite exercise is an “eight-ingredient showdown,” in which teams taste eight random ingredients individually and then devise a dish together. The students usually expect it to taste bad, and they are usually pleasantly surprised. “You didn’t see the beauty in what you had, and now you do,” he tells them.
Reclaim the Land is the horticultural program, which is led by Cinnamon Sanchez, The Evolved Network’s lead garden instructor. It draws on African and Indigenous ideas of reciprocity and living in harmony with the land, and it aims to reconnect students with ancestral relationships to it.
Project TEN (an acronym for The Evolved Network) sends kits home with students. Each contains ingredients for a seasonal dish, two conversation starters, and a QR code linking to a video of Sebastian making the dish, filmed by his partner Diana Klimovich. One of the first kits drew a thank-you on Facebook from a grandmother, who said the dish would become a Thanksgiving tradition.
Partner School Farmers Markets were piloted at two schools, timed to run at after-school pickup so parents could attend. Prominent chefs tabled and served, and students ran their own stations serving food they had made in class. Sebastian wants to hold more of them and says he needs funding so that the farmers and chefs who take part are paid.
The Evolve Network Way Fellowship extends the philosophy to the adults who work with students. Sebastian described it as “not a training” but “an alternate way of considering being with students.” Its 11 modules are built around vulnerability and self-examination. He plans to offer a menu of options for how much of the material a school or group takes on.
The Young Chef’s Journal is a seasonal placemat worksheet that Diana designed. It was inspired by an idea from Sarah Stegner — a longtime mentor to Sebastian who is chef-owner of the renowned Prairie Grass Cafe in suburban Northbrook, a founding Board member of Chicago’s Green City Market and a co-founder of Chicago Chefs Cook, a philanthropic arm of the region’s culinary community. The placemats, which now appear in 22 restaurants, invite kids to ask questions and get curious, even if only about the color of zucchini.
Why the Board Signed On
Also speaking on the webinar were two board members who spoke about what drew them in to Sebastian’s vision.
Stacy Olsen, an entrepreneurial and personal development coach, came to Chicago in 2023 and met Sebastian at Green City Market. She grew up in a wealthy Texas community while her family was on food stamps, and she remembers the humiliation of the reduced-price lunch program, when a punched card announced her status to her classmates. “It really made mealtime very stressful for me,” she said. She wants other kids to have a different relationship with food.
Melissa Clark, the board president, was introduced to Sebastian by Sarah at Green City Market, for which Melissa also serves as a board member. She recalled childhood visits to her grandfather’s farm in Oklahoma, where she helped shake pecans from the trees, and the open conversations she had with her mother in the kitchen. “I always say food is healing,” she said. At one of The Evolved Network’s school farmers markets, she watched children eat things she never expected them to try, and families getting to know one another.
Creating Safe Spaces
During the question period, Sebastian said he treats the classroom as a therapeutic space, and anything sensitive a student shares stays within the group. He does not run formal one-on-one sessions, but he will step aside with a child who is struggling.
Some students have disclosed serious personal problems, including instances of abuse, and Sebastian said that dismissing such disclosures out of discomfort would be wrong. Instead, he acknowledges the courage involved and works to build support among staff and peers.
He also described apologizing to students when he gets something wrong. “Too many of our kids don’t hear ‘I’m sorry’ from us as adults,” he said, “and I don’t want to be that person.”
What Comes Next
Sebastian wants to deepen the program’s work with parents, while keeping wary of burdening school partners. The longer-term plan is to create chapters in other cities, once the organization is financially stable in Chicago.
For now, he says what he wants is for kids to draw out their own goals and personalities rather than chase an outside idea of potential. “I think we draw uniqueness and allow kids to feel pride and dignity in that experience,” he said. “Then that’s when they live into their potential, because it’s theirs.”
Click the first button below to visit The Evolved Network's website, and the second to read the Local Food Forum article about the organization's fundraising cocktail party to be held at Chicago's Publican Quality Meats on November 11.
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