The Current System is Broken: Bringing Hunger Relief Home for the Summer

By Kevin Hagan

It’s summertime, and with summer break comes the laughter of carefree children in many neighborhoods… But not all of them. When the final school bell rings, millions of kids head home to empty refrigerators.

During the school year, 21 million American children qualify for free or low-cost school meals from school lunch programs. But when school ends, so do these reliable meals. Kids right here in the United States are going hungry this summer, wondering where their next meal will come from (we call this “food insecurity”). How can they enjoy a summer of just being kids when their stomachs are growling? That’s just it – they can’t.

At Feed the Children, we know that hunger is the enemy of childhood. I see firsthand what happens to children living with poverty and hunger around the world. The statistics are overwhelming: lack of nutritious food stunts the growth of one in four children. It may be difficult to believe, but in our own backyard, hunger is equally as prevalent (though it looks different). Our home state of Oklahoma is ranked 51st for kids experiencing summer hunger and is plagued with high rural and urban food insecurity rates.

There’s no reason children should go hungry these days when we have enough food for everyone. So why aren’t things better? We know one reason: The nonprofit system is broken from the way we’ve worked alone, to the way we’ve raised money, to the way we’ve shared what we’re doing, to the way we’ve fed kids. We can’t defeat child hunger the way we’ve always done things. We have to change, so that’s what we’re doing.

We have to unite against this enemy. We will work alongside similar groups, support innovative startups to discover more effective ways to work, and share our successes so they can copy and spread what works to help many more kids. We want to encourage thinking in new ways, taking risks and learning from our failures.

This summer, we’re focusing on ending child hunger in Oklahoma by trying a new public-private partnership. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has a Summer Food Service Program (SFSP) that helps fill the gap over the summer, but in Oklahoma, very few agencies are involved with the summer meals program. SFSP also requires that kids eat their food at approved feeding sites – they can’t take it to go. This keeps many families from getting food – for example, some are not able to drive to a site.

>> Continue Reading