Since launching the Michigan No Kid Hungry Initiative this past May, The United Way for Southeastern Michigan -- in partnership with Share our Strength and the State of Michigan -- has been working to align resources toward shared priorities, while improving our child-nutrition infrastructure to feed more kids. Perhaps most importantly, these efforts are working to build stronger lines of communication between grassroots organizations, state agencies and everyone in between who shares our mission.

To get started, we took a hard look at the needs of our state’s children, and then we focused on a few priority programs and goal-setting. We started by focusing on summer meals. Many kids who eat free and reduced-price meals during the school year don’t have access to nutritious meals during the summer. With further digging, we found out that fewer than 15% of kids who eat a free or reduced-price lunch at school also receive a meal during the summer. We knew Michigan could do better.

We saw a similar trend with school breakfast. Fewer than half of the kids who ate a free or reduced-price school lunch were also eating a school breakfast. Our mothers always taught us that breakfast is the most important meal of the day and we knew hungry kids can’t be expected to achieve their full potential -- so into our goals it went!

To round out the work ahead of us, we set a goal to increase the number of kids and families who receive nutrition education. It’s one thing to ensure that kids have access to nutritious meals right now, but we also know that it was just as important to teach our kids how to feed themselves nutritious meals as they grow.

We set a modest goal of increasing these three areas of work by 2%. Now that we’ve crunched the numbers and tallied our results, we’re proud to announce that we met and surpassed our goals in all three programs!

Of course, this work has been a shared effort between UWSEM, the State of Michigan and Gov. Rick Snyder and Share our Strength. Community partners such as local food pantries and stellar volunteers have also helped in these efforts. 

Much of our work so far has been concentrated in Southeastern Michigan and in the city of Detroit. We’ve all seen the headlines; Detroit faces its fair share of challenges. We’re working together with partners to change the image of our community by tackling the issue of childhood hunger. Recently, our local public radio station, WDET, featured the series “Back to Basics: Detroit’s Food Economy” which is highlighting this very topic.

During the next year of Michigan No Kid Hungry, we’ll be bringing the lessons learned to more communities in the State. By bringing together state agencies, nonprofits and corporations with a shared vision, we are strengthening our individual contributions and progressing together toward our shared goal: making No Kid Hungry a reality in Michigan.   

To find out more about our work, please visit: http://www.liveunitedsem.org/pages/michigan-no-kid-hungry