Nourishing Our Children

Our Future at Risk

No parent wants their child to go hungry, yet we know that many families across Northwest NC lack the resources to provide adequate nutrition for their families. Across our service area an average of 47percent of students enrolled in school qualify for the National Free and Reduced Lunch program – a startling indicator of the extent to which many families are struggling economically in the region. Sadly, for 185 days each year, the majority of these children do not have access to the federal summer feeding program. In fact, in 2007 North Carolina sent $7.4 million in summer feeding funding back to the federal government.

To help spread the word among potential host agencies about available funding for summer feeding sites, officials from the Summer Food Services Program are invited to conduct workshops at our Annual Agency Conference. We also continue to explore strategies for educating various stakeholders about existing model programs that have been successfully implemented in other parts of the country and look forward to sharing our progress in future reports.

To help ensure that we can continue to provide food Food2Kids through our partner agencies during the summer months, we launched the Bag Childhood Hunger summer food drive in an unprecedented collaboration among grocery retailers in our area, including Food Lion, Harris Teeter, Lowes Foods and Wal-Mart. The pilot effort was a great success and we look forward to its expansion in the years ahead.