Via United Way King County
It’s hard to imagine anything more disheartening than a child who is eager to learn and grow, but can’t focus in school because they are hungry. However, the fact is that numbers of hungry children in America have risen to 16.2 million in 2011, including 39,280 hungry children in Washington state (Source). The February release of the local Communities Count report, revealed an even more shocking statistic: that nearly 50% of Hispanic households with children in King County are food insecure.
The negative effects of hunger and food insecurity on the growth and development of children are clear:
- Hungry children ages 0-3 cannot learn as fast, as much, or as well due to permanent harm to cognitive functioning caused by undernutrition
- Hungry children do more poorly in school and have lower test scores because they don’t have adequate energy and cannot concentrate on an empty stomach
- Hungry children have more social, behavioral, and health problems and therefore have less energy for complex social interaction and cannot adapt as effectively to environmental stresses (Source)
Breakfast, however, is a different story – less than half of low-income students in the U.S. participate in the School Breakfast Program. We all know breakfast is the most important meal of the day, which is why local organizations like the Children’s Alliance is taking the initiative to improve participation in School Breakfast with their Fuel Up First With Breakfast Challenge – a friendly competition to get school administrators to step up to the plate and take ownership of feeding hungry children. Check out the video below from National non-profit Share Our Strength that shows how kids at one school feel about their new universal breakfast:
Click here to view the embedded video.
A third federal child nutrition program that is relatively new to the scene is called the At-Risk Afterschool Meals Program. This is a reimbursement program for afterschool care settings, day cares, and other out-of-school hours care centers that fund meals, typically supper, for school-age kids. The United Way of King County, in partnership with Public Health of Seattle & King County and the Childrens Alliance, is working to get the word out to potential sponsors in order to get kids free, nutritious supper afterschool, when parents may still be at work or unable to provide a home-cooked meal.
The last meal program for kids that I’ll mention is also the focus of Hunger Action Week – the Summer Meals program. Of the 300,000 Washington children who received free or reduced breakfast or lunch in the 2008-09 school year, only 11 percent received summer meals through the federal Summer Food Service Program. We need to do more to ensure that families access what’s already out there. UWKC partner, WithinReach, has a summer meals site search tool and they are doing amazing outreach to get more sites across the state on board serving meals at more diverse locations, in order to meet kids and families where they live, learn, and play.
If you’d like to help United Way fund organizations that can effectively get good, healthy food to kids in the summertime, consider giving a financial gift on our website. Even a generous gift of $50 can provide 20 meals to hungry kids this summer.
Since federal nutrition programs are kind of boring, I wanted to share another way that teachers and non-profits are tackling the issue of hunger and nutrition education, and it’s through farm-to-table programs. Click here to read about the great Farm-to-School programs locally supported by CPPW, or check out the video below about a model program from Massachusetts called The Food Project that is getting at-risk kids in touch with where their food comes from while developing leadership and teamwork skills and growing over 250,000 lbs of food for local hunger relief.
Click here to view the embedded video.
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