Cure Hunger Blog

It’s July. Our federal legislators are busy on the hill trying to wrap it up before their August break. In the anti-hunger world, we have been watching, supporting and advocating for a bill that will make a difference here in our own Hoosier communities. It is called Improving Nutrition for America’s Children Act of 2010 (H.R. 5504).

On July 15, the House Education and Labor Committee completed the markup of its draft and approved it. The bill calls for about $8 billion in new funding for child nutrition programs over the next 10 years. No funding sources have been identified to cover the additional spending. The bill cannot go to the full House for a vote until that is done, and it may prove to be the roadblock. In the Senate, the Agricultural Committee approved its version in March, but it hasn’t been to the full Senate yet.

It’s a big bill with many provisions important to the work we do in east central Indiana in terms of filling nutrition gaps for low-income children. The bill could authorize a pilot program targeted at providing nutritious, child-friendly food to at-risk school children on weekends and during extended school holidays. This sounds a lot like the BackPack Program that Second Harvest does in schools throughout our region. Adequate funding would allow us to sustain and expand the program.

The bill also encourages expansion of the school breakfast program by providing competitive grant awards to help schools establish or increase the program. One possibility would be to encourage schools to provide breakfast service outside of the cafeteria. In Indiana in a 2009 210,886 children participated in the breakfast program. School lunch had 788,167 participants.

The bill addresses hiking the reimbursable cost of a school meal by 6 cents, the first increase in 30 years. There are provisions for increased food safety measures, nutritious foods in school snack machines and getting local farm produce into local schools.

The last one I will mention is the Summer Food Service Program. Second Harvest has sponsored sites for several years throughout our service area. We have encouraged other organizations to be sponsors. This is “food that’s in when school is out” and provides summer meals to children who eat free and reduced-price school meals.

The act will provide grants to existing Summer Food sponsors to expand their programs, and to new sponsors to develop sites. Nationally, only 2.2 million children of the more than 19 million receiving free and reduced-price school meals participated last summer.

The bill could fund initiatives to get more children into the program. Another provision would allow the program to be offered even if only 40 percent of the participants are eligible. The threshold is now 50 percent and eliminates good programs that could be feeding more children.

Want to impact this legislation? Call Rep. Mike Pence and urge him to support Child Nutrition Reauthorization at the proposed level of $1 billion per year so we can increase food access to our low-income children. Dial the Congressional switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask for Mike. Time is of the essence!

What’s for lunch? Sadly, for children soon out of school for the summer, the question is, will there be any lunch?

The recession has hit a mighty blow to families in east central Indiana. Children are hungry. Food insecurity is the current term. It describes people who have limited or uncertain access to adequate food. With unemployment still in the double digits – 12 percent in some parts of the Second Harvest Food Bank service area — more people are food insecure than ever before. Even worse are those households that have very low food security.

These neighbors of ours are cutting meal portions, skipping meals, going the whole day without eating and are worrying about running out of food.

Unbelievably, one in four American children don’t have enough food to eat. Children living in East Central Indiana are no exception. Families are depending on food pantries and kitchens.

Our eight-county area has a population under 500,000 people. Close to 70,000 of them relied on emergency food last year and 44 percent of those were children.

We are lucky to have the National School Lunch and Breakfast Programs here in Indiana. During the school year, children have access to nourishing meals. So what happens when school is out? With a lot of help from Indiana’s own U.S. Sen. Dick Lugar, the Summer Food Service Program is in place. Unlike school lunch, this program has no built-in population of children to serve on a daily basis.

For the most part, we have to go find them. Second Harvest Food Bank has been a sponsor of Summer Food for many years. We work with groups in our region who have summer programs for children and want to provide lunch. Last summer we sponsored 19 of the 47 sites throughout East Central Indiana.

School systems are the most natural link to children for Summer Food. The federal government offers a seamless summer program where the food service continues naturally from school lunch into Summer Food to make sure children are fed when school is out. Elwood Community Schools, Wabash City Schools, Delaware Community Schools and Randolph Eastern all offered Summer Food last year.

Jay Turner directs food services for Elwood Community Schools in Madison County. He is also the regional representative for the Indiana School Nutrition Association. Jay says doing Summer Food at schools is a no-brainer, “It is almost a must in this economy. I strongly suggest any school do Summer Food.”

Jay is willing to guide schools through the process and can be contacted at 552-1900, ext. 6200.

Jay said that many Indiana schools do summer food in their buildings. Elwood will do so during the summer school programs. They elected to shift one school program to the nearby Calloway Park and saw participation jump from 15 children a day to more than 100. Jay pointed out that program costs are reimbursed by the federal Summer Food Service Program making it entirely feasible for area schools to fully participate.

The deadline to become a sponsor is April 26. Go to www.doe.in.gov/food/summer/welcome.html. Organizations may provide sites for existing sponsors; phone Erin Rockhill at 287-8698 ext 102 for more information.