Summer Meals Program Provides Economic Relief for Families Facing Financial Hardship Due to Loss of Free and Reduced Priced School Meals
Frankfort, KY — When schools close their doors for the summer break, many kids find themselves without access to the reliable nutrition provided by school meals. The over 200,000 kids in Kentucky who experience food insecurity often face the hungriest season of the year during the summer months. No Kid Hungry Kentucky is working to change that by providing a total of $115,470 in grants to seven organizations across the state to help reach more kids in rural communities with summer meals.
The following school districts and community organizations received summer meal grants from No Kid Hungry Kentucky:
- Edmonson County Schools
- Elliott County Schools
- Feeding America, Kentucky’s Heartland
- Henderson County Schools
- Powell County Schools
- Shelby County Schools
- Todd County Schools
Rural communities face particular challenges when it comes to accessing summer meal programs. Transportation issues, work schedules, extreme weather–all can pose significant hardship to families when it comes to connecting kids to summer meals. Traditional summer meal programs have only reached a fraction of kids in rural communities, but non-congregate summer meal flexibilities have been a game changer in recent years. No Kid Hungry’s grant funding supports summer meal programs that make meals more accessible for rural families by delivering meals to children who need them or allowing parents to pick meals up at a central location to be taken home for their kids, often for multiple days at a time.
“The tremendous growth in summer meal programs across the Commonwealth since the non-congregate option became available shows that Kentucky families have embraced its flexibility. As a result, summer meals are reaching more Kentucky kids than ever before,” says John Cain, the Kentucky Kids Eat Program Director for Feeding Kentucky and Co-Manager of No Kid Hungry Kentucky.
For help finding a Summer Meal site, visit NoKidHungry.org/Help or /Ayuda. The program is available to all children 18 years and under.
No Kid Hungry Kentucky is a public-private coalition between No Kid Hungry and Feeding Kentucky.
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About No Kid Hungry
No child should go hungry in America. But millions of kids in the United States live with hunger. No Kid Hungry is working to end childhood hunger by helping launch and improve programs that give all kids the healthy food they need to thrive. This is a problem we know how to solve. No Kid Hungry is a campaign of Share Our Strength, an organization committed to ending hunger and poverty. Join us at NoKidHungry.org.
About Feeding Kentucky:
Feeding Kentucky is comprised of seven Feeding America food banks that reach all 120 counties of Kentucky and serve an estimated one in seven of all Kentuckians annually. Last year, its members distributed 78 million meals in partnership with more than 1,400 charitable feeding agencies such as pantries, soup kitchens, and shelters. For more information on how you can fight hunger in your community, visit FeedingKy.org.
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