At No Kid Hungry, we say that $1 can provide up 10 meals for kids in need. Our donors often ask: How is this possible?
It’s not because we get a bulk discount on food. In fact, we don’t buy food at all.
Lack of food isn’t the problem here in the United States. The problem is ensuring that children have regular access to the food they need.
That’s why the No Kid Hungry approach is about finding sustainable, permanent solutions to ending childhood hunger in America. We support and help strengthen programs, like breakfast after the bell, afterschool meals and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), that increase access to meals for kids across the country.
When we carefully invest donor dollars in these programs, they can reach a lot more kids. And we constantly evaluate our strategic investments to ensure we’re maximizing our supporters’ gifts. We’ve been monitoring and analyzing data for these programs for more than a decade, so we know that your support can provide up to 10 meals for every $1 spent.
This past year, of course, we've had to adapt to the challenges of COVID-19. Schools and community groups had to rapidly transform their operations to feed children the meals they normally receive at school. This caused severe financial strain; the cost for school districts to provide meals during the pandemic is significantly higher than normal.
Here are a few examples of how we’re helping right now:
- In Hammond, Indiana, the school district’s cafeteria staff served meals during the pandemic to as many as 2,400 kids a day, three times a week. An emergency grant from No Kid Hungry helped them get the equipment they needed to continue serving meals, including meal carts and temperature-controlled pans to allow staff to safely serve meals for hours at a time. Since school closures, the district’s staff have served over 60,000 meals to children in the community.
- In Florence Township, New Jersey, the districts’ cafeteria staff went from serving 20 free meals a day to 120 overnight. They’re using emergency grants from No Kid Hungry to help operate grab-and-go feeding sites where they serve a healthy breakfast and lunch to students every day, from a safe distance.
We know how to spend donations where they’ll help feed the most children, but since the pandemic the grants we're providing are on average four times higher than comparable grants awarded during the previous school year. Because of that, we can’t say that $1 can provide up 10 meals during this crisis.
At No Kid Hungry, we rely on the generosity of individual donors as well as charitable support from many companies to fund our work to end childhood hunger. Maintaining the trust of donors in our organization is incredibly important to us as an organization – and essential to our work.
Our promise to you is that we will be transparent and communicate regularly about how your dollars are being used to help provide healthy meals to children in the United States.
