The Food Bank of Lincoln is helping make sure children have access to nutritious meals while school is out for the summer. Through the federally funded Summer Food Service Program, free meals will be available to children ages 1 through 18 at more than two dozen sites across Lincoln.
“Those different sites have a little variance in their hours, but mostly operate all summer long and serve breakfast and lunch,” says Tiffany Murray, Chief Operating Officer for the Food Bank of Lincoln.
She says they partner with Hy-Vee to provide those meals to help fill the nutrition gap many families face when school cafeterias are closed during the summer months. Those meal sites are located in low-income areas where at least half of local children qualify for free or reduced-price school meals.
The Food Bank also serves needy families through seven different food market sites. “Those are sites that schools allow those students and their families to come in, they can select from a variety of different kinds of items to help be supplemental to those summer needs,” Murray says. “It might be oatmeal, granola bars, spaghetti and sauce, pancakes and syrup.”
A third way they keep children fed during the summer months is through their backpack program. “So those kids that are unable to make it to one of those summer feeding sites or one of those food markets, we actually home deliver those backpacks.” She says during the school year they provide about 6,200 backpacks of food each week.
Murray says by the time summer is over and the school bell rings in the fall, they expect to serve more than 70,000 meals through the breakfast and lunch programs, a big increase over last year.