In Alma, there was a bookmobile. In other communities across Arkansas there were churches and nonprofits.
All of them worked together to help prepare, deliver and find new ways to serve an extra 1.6 million meals over the summer for needy children in a state where more than 280,000 students qualify for free and reduced lunches. The additional meals pushed the total lunches served during the summer of 2013 to 4.1 million and represented the largest increase in summer meals of any state in the country.
On Thursday, the U.S.Department of Agriculture presented an award to the partnership of Arkansas corporations, nonprofits and government agencies that helped feed thousands of additional children in the summer of 2013.
“For more than a decade we tried to work to increase access to meals during the summer, and I can say that Arkansas led us on that road,” said Audrey Rowe, administrator of the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service.
“The state of Arkansas realized the importance of filling that nutrition and hunger gap during the summer, and their achievement of providing summer meals is evidence of what public-private partnerships can achieve when they work together to end childhood hunger,” she said.
Rowe said nationwide about seven million additional meals were served to children this summer compared with 2012. Arkansas’ efforts accounted for nearly 23 percent of that increase, outpacing efforts in much larger states including the four that rounded out the top five - New York, California, Florida and Tennessee.
“Arkansas is number one, and it’s not [a] per capita number one,” said Arkansas Gov.Mike Beebe. “That means in just raw numbers we kicked the devil out of states with … at least 10 times our population.”
The partners in the No Kid Hungry effort included the national group Share Our Strength, the Arkansas Hunger Relief Alliance, the governor’s office, the state departments of Education, Human Services, and Health, and a host of corporate sponsors including the Food Network, Pepsi Co., the Arby’s Foundation and the Wal-Mart Foundation.
The alliance set a goal of increasing summer meal participation by 10 percent, but Rowe said the state increased its participation by 50 percent. She said the state set a goal of adding 125 new feeding sites but added 280 sites this summer, taking the total to more than 880 sites serving lunches.
Rowe said those results were accomplished by pushing the envelope, such as designing unconventional transportation programs to help children get to feeding sites.
In Prescott, Superintendent of Schools Robert Poole said they have a summer breakfast and lunch program. In January, they added a free after-school dinner program for low-income children.
Children participate in after-school activities, get an evening meal and then are bused home.
The feeding program is crucial, Poole said, adding, “If we didn’t provide that meal for them at breakfast and lunch, a lot of them would have nothing to eat.”
In Alma, sack lunches were delivered via the bookmobile one day a week last summer and demand was brisk.
The first week, all 80 lunches were devoured by children. “We used all the sandwiches we had,” said Debbie Stewart, food-services director for the Alma School District. The next week, they prepared 100 sandwiches and then rushed to make more as their supply rapidly dwindled.
By the end of the summer, they were passing out 160 lunches. This year, they plan to send the book- and sandwich-mobile out two days per week during the summer.
“I think it’s a really good way to reach our kids in the summertime,” Stewart said. “It’s just a real positive thing.”
The program was so successful this summer that John Green, chief financial officer for the national group Share Our Strength, said his organization will share some of Arkansas’ expansion ideas with others.
“The secrets to the success have been leadership … innovation … persistence. Since we’re a national organization, we look at Arkansas as a model. We are going to be taking what we learned [here] to other states like Michigan, North Carolina and Maryland,” he said.
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 02/28/2014