Free to take
Take these. We are not asking for anything.
The first thing we have that a children’s home can use today — before any partnership, any paperwork, any conversation with us. Two posters, in Spanish, built for the wall above a kitchen counter.
México
Platos Saludables para Niños de MéxicoHealthy plates for children in Mexico
Three meals built from ordinary Mexican food — nothing imported, nothing a market in Chiapas or Guanajuato would not have. This is the destination, not the starting line. Read the section below before you judge your own kitchen against it.
Colombia
Platos Saludables para Niños de ColombiaHealthy plates for children in Colombia
The same three meals, rebuilt from the coast. Not a translation of the Mexican poster — a different kitchen, with arepa where the tortilla was and yuca where the rice was.
Printable tools
Three sheets that do the work a poster cannot
A poster shows what good looks like. These are the working documents that get it done — designed to be printed in black and white on ordinary paper, written on in pen, and replaced when they wear out.
One sheet a week
Seven-day menu
Breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner, across seven days, with the plate rule at the top and a six-question check before you hang it. The single most common gap we see is a kitchen with no written menu — the cook decides each morning from whatever is there, and variety quietly disappears.
Download · PDF Versión en españolOne sheet per child
Growth record
Ten rows for date, age, weight, height and notes — twice a year for five years. How to measure so the numbers mean something, and the five signs that say take this child to the health post. It diagnoses nothing. It tells you when to ask someone who can.
Download · PDF Versión en españolOne sheet per young person
Leaving-care checklist
Identity, health, education, work, money, housing and people — what a young person needs in hand before they turn eighteen, with space to record where each original is kept. Opened at sixteen, not at eighteen. Replacing a lost document takes months, and nobody has months.
Download · PDF Versión en españolFree to print, copy, translate and adapt. Put your own home’s name on them if you want. The leaving-care checklist is a tracking tool, not a legal source — confirm every requirement with your local authority before acting on it, because the rules change and they differ by country.
Two more things, also free
If a PDF is not what you actually need
Printed and mailed
We will send you a printed set, free
Not every home has a working color printer, and toner costs more than most kitchens can spare. Tell us where to send them and a printed set goes in the post at no cost — with your home’s name on them if you want it there.
Request a printed setFive minutes, private
How is the food in your home?
Fifteen questions you answer yourself, with an immediate result and three concrete things to try this week — chosen from your answers, cheapest first. No sign-up, and we do not know you took it unless you tell us.
Take the assessment →The honest part
The distance between that poster and a real kitchen
In homes we have visited, a whole day of food has looked like this: a small bread roll with milk in the morning. Rice and beans at midday. Horchata and rice at night. That is the day.
Put that beside the poster above and the poster starts to read as a rebuke. It is not meant to be one, and no director chose that menu. A budget chose it. The poster is where a kitchen is going, not the line it is failing to meet.
So here is what we would actually say to a home feeding children that way, and none of it costs much:
- 1
The midday meal is already the best one. Rice and beans together make a complete protein — each one supplies what the other is missing. That is not a consolation prize. It is genuinely good food, and it is already on the table.
- 2
Breakfast is where one peso buys the most. An egg is among the cheapest protein there is. One egg added to the bread and milk changes a morning more than anything else on the poster above.
- 3
Dinner is usually the weakest meal and the cheapest to fix. Horchata is rice and sugar; served with rice, the evening is one food twice. The beans are already in the kitchen for lunch. Moving a portion of them to the evening costs nothing at all.
- 4
A squeeze of lime on the beans. The iron in beans is hard for a body to absorb on its own, and vitamin C changes that. A lime costs almost nothing and does real work.
- 5
Whatever vegetable is cheapest that week. Not the one on the poster — the one the market is selling cheap. Color on the plate is the goal; which color matters far less.
Being built now
El primer paso — the poster for a kitchen that is nowhere near the other two.
The same three meals, but starting from bread and milk, rice and beans, and building one cheap change at a time. It is the version most homes need first, and we should have made it first.
If you run a home, tell us what belongs on it. You know your budget and your market better than we ever will.
Why it is free
There is no form in front of this, and there is not going to be
The standard move is to put an email box in front of a download. We are not going to do that with this one.
A home feeding thirty children on a budget that does not stretch should not have to trade anything — not an address, not a conversation, not a meeting — for a picture of what a balanced day looks like. Dignity rather than charity applies to information too.
It is also the honest answer to a question we get asked early: what can you actually offer a home you have never met? This. Today. Whether or not anything else ever comes of it.
What we do not do
We do not know that you took it, and we would like to keep it that way.
No email box, no tracking on the download, no follow-up. If you want to hear from us, there is a form further down this site and you can decide that on your own terms.
Use it however you want. Print it, copy it, translate it into a local language, put your own home’s name on it, hand it to the home down the road. We are not precious about it. It exists to be on a wall.
How to use it
Made for a kitchen, not a report
- 1
Print it at letter size, portrait. The PDF is already set up for that. It reads clearly from across a room, which is the point.
- 2
Laminate it if you can, or slide it into a plastic sleeve. It is going somewhere with steam and hands.
- 3
Put it where food is prepared, not in the office. The person who needs it is the one cooking, and often that is a rotating group of people rather than one cook.
- 4
It is in Spanish because the people cooking read Spanish. The English on this page is for donors. The poster is for the kitchen.
- 5
Treat it as a shape, not a recipe. If the market had no papaya this week, the shape still holds — a protein, a grain, something from the ground, something that grew on a tree.
Coming
What we are building next
Everything here will be free on the same terms. We are building it in the order homes tell us they need it.
- A version for the youngest children — portions and textures for two to five, which is a different poster and not a smaller one.
- Shopping the same plates on a smaller budget — what to buy first when the money runs out before the month does.
- A growth and wellbeing check a home can run itself, twice a year, without a clinic.
- The same three meals as a weekly menu, so a kitchen can plan rather than decide each morning.
If you run a home and something else would be more useful than any of that, tell us. We would rather build the thing you actually need. Here is how to reach us →
These posters show general examples of balanced meals using foods common in each country. They are not medical or dietary advice, and they are not a substitute for a nutritionist or a doctor. A child with a specific medical or nutritional need should be seen by a professional.