For Immediate Release With over 116,000 children on free and reduced price lunch at school, what do these children do for meals during the summer? Many go without lunch or their families have to stretch an already meager food budget to accommodate the need for more meals at home.
“Inter-Faith Food Shuttle tries to come up with multiple strategies to meet this increased need in summer,” says Kyle Abrams, Child Hunger Programs Manager.
Starting Monday, June 16, IFFS will deliver free meals in several ways:
- The IFFS Food Truck, aka “Mobile Tastiness Machine,” will make weekly dinner stops, 5p-7p at four Raleigh housing communities: Chavis Park Community Center, Horseshoe Park, Parrish Manor, and Maple Ridge Apartments. Expectations are to feed to approximately 100 children with free meals at each stop.
- IFFS is partnering with Southeast Raleigh Assembly’s (SERA) “Dancing in the Park” event on Monday evenings during the summer at Chavis Park. “This is a great event for families to have fun, get some exercise, and then a nice healthy--and free-- meal from our food truck,” says Abrams.
- IFFS is delivering 100 hot, nutritionally-balanced meals for lunch 5 days per week to East Durham Children’s Initiative for their summer program. The same daily delivery is being made for 40 children at Full Circles Foundation in Raleigh. IFFS will be providing meals for 25 children at two Read and Feed of Wake County sites once a week as well.
“All told, by summer’s end, we expect to deliver over 11,500 meals to several hundred kids, but that’s just a drop in the bucket of need,” says Abrams.
Families are encouraged to “shop for free” at one of IFFS’s open Mobile Markets occurring monthly at several locations. Find a list of locations, days, and times here.
What you can do to help? Some food donations tend to go down during the summer, while at the same time our need for food goes UP to prepare summer meals for children normally on free and reduced priced school lunches. While produce is generally plentiful, donations of money are needed to purchase high quality proteins, such as chicken, ground turkey, and ground beef to prepare hot meals. We can also use kid-friendly, healthy meal and snack options that can go in snack bags, such as granola bars, fruit cups, juices, shelf-stable milk, and canned veggies. Donate to support our programs at http://foodshuttle.org/how-to-help/donate/
Learn about hunger in North Carolina. Watch this video http://foodshuttle.org/about-us/ and read the stats at http://foodshuttle.org/hunger-stories/hunger-stats/
Sign up for our newsletter and spread the word. http://foodshuttle.org/news/newsletters/
ABOUT INTER-FAITH FOOD SHUTTLE Inter-Faith Food Shuttle is a hunger relief organization that feeds people, teaches skills for self-sufficiency, and grows access to local food for communities in need. Hunger IS fixable if communities work together to do 2 things: create sources of healthy food in every low-income neighborhood and teach skills for self-sufficiency. By learning job skills, good nutrition on a budget, and even how to grow their own food, people can begin to move themselves out of hunger. Whether it’s by keeping good food out of the landfill, distributing BackPack Buddies, teaching nutrition, setting up neighborhood mobile markets , training culinary skills, or demonstrating how to grow food, IFFS goes directly to people in need to create what works to empower them. “We feed. We teach. We grow.” 25 years of innovation. Building a healthy and hungry-free community.
Contact: Cindy Sink, Cindy@FoodShuttle.org 919-390-1970
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