I recently started a job with Second Harvest as a site supervisor with the Summer Food Services Program. This week I am calling sites and confirming food orders and all that jazz. On Monday, I start riding a bus around Unicoi County and Johnson City feeding kids. I decided to spend some time today learning about this USDA program and looking up info about Unicoi to figure out where hungry kids are in my community."The Summer Food Service Program (SFSP) was established to ensure that low-income children continue to receive nutritious meals when school is not in session. Free meals, that meet Federal nutrition guidelines, are provided to all children 18 years old and under at approved SFSP sites in areas with significant concentrations of low-income children. "
This program targets neighborhoods around schools with 50% or higher of the school population is enrolled in the Free of Reduced Lunch Program. Our program is an open program which means we don't have to enroll kids. All they have to do is show up, get on the bus and we will feed them. Once a month the Mobile Food Pantry will be following our bus handing out food boxes to the families.
According to the USDA folks about 21 million kids access free or reduced price lunches during the school year. During the Summer only 2.3 million receive meals through USDA's Summer feeding programs.
That's means a lot of kids may be going hungry after school lets out for the Summer.
I'm not sure why this program is so underutilized, but I am looking forward to learning more about it and more about my community through this work.
If you are interested in finding food services in your community I have put some links and numbers below.
Now time for some music from one of my favorite local artists, Amythyst Kiah.
USDA Programs:
http://www.fns.usda.gov/summer-food-service-program-sfsp
Second Harvest Food Bank of Northeast TN
http://www.netfoodbank.org/
Find other programs by searching on http://www.whyhunger.org/findfood or calling the national hotlines.
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