Second Harvest pickup location
Students can’t learn if they’re preoccupied with where their next meal will come from. And according to national anti-hunger campaign No Kid Hungry, if students don’t have sufficient access to nutritious food during summer breaks, they’re more likely to forget what they’ve already learned, fall behind in the upcoming school year and develop lasting health issues.
Food insecurity is by no means a new problem, but it has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Nonprofit food-bank organization Feeding America reports that 14.2 percent of children in Davidson County were food insecure in 2019. Though concrete data is still limited regarding the effects the pandemic had on child hunger, that number has surely gone up.
Summer food programs have long existed to alleviate a burden that some families struggle with — providing summertime meals when kids are out of school. In Tennessee, the federal Summer Food Service Program enables organizations to distribute meals to children across the state. In order to establish a wider reach, parent organizations register with the SFSP and then sponsor other organizations to distribute food. Second Harvest Food Bank of Middle Tennessee is one facilitator of the SFSP and currently sponsors 21 sites. By sponsoring sites, Second Harvest can handle the complicated legalities of the SFSP requirements and enable organizations like churches, day camps and community centers to focus on getting meals to hungry kids.
The Metro Action Commission also sponsors summer meal sites throughout Nashville. Before the pandemic, the commission managed 110 food sites, but as summer camps and community centers closed for safety reasons, that number decreased. Though there were fewer sites, there was also a decrease in regulations — meaning, for instance, students no longer have to eat meals on site and they can now take a few days’ worth of food at a time.
“Everyone deserves to eat every day — just bottom line,” says the Metro Action Commission’s Lisa McCrady. “And those of us who are responsible for ensuring that resources are flowing, and that they are flowing efficiently, we are still being good stewards of that, and we are very committed to making sure that that is always on our radar, that we’re always paying attention to it.”
Both Second Harvest and the Metro Action Commission utilize various food-distribution methods. Some meals are delivered via trucks in areas where residents have limited transportation, others are handed out at pickup locations, and some are distributed through community organizations that pair meal handouts with other activities to further engage students and remove the stigma of receiving free meals.
Second Harvest combats barriers to receiving food — barriers like awareness and lack of transportation — by providing a food finder directory on its website, where people can type in their ZIP code and learn about nearby food distribution sites, what kind of food is available and when. Families can also text FEEDS to 797979 for the same information.
Students enrolled in Metro Nashville Public Schools summer programs like Promising Scholars also receive free breakfast and lunches during programming. According to MNPS, students haven’t needed to qualify for free and reduced meals since September due to funding from the federal government. These no-cost meals will continue until at least June of next year.
Children of course aren’t the only students who face hunger, even if the SFSP only covers Tennesseans 18 and younger. Whether they’re fresh out of high school or a bit older, college students frequently face food insecurity as well, and some have families to provide for. Recognizing this need, the Nashville State Community College Foundation has implemented a food program called Campus Cupboard, which enables students to access free food for themselves and their families.
“It would be lovely just to know that none of our students, while they’re attending classes here, are ever hungry,” says NSCC Foundation executive director Lauren Bell. “Whether that’s just, ‘I’m hungry that day,’ or, ‘I’m going to be hungry all week.’ ”
Wendy Rake, digital engagement specialist at Second Harvest, tells the Scene that, despite the returning sense of normalcy as the pandemic has subsided: “Normalcy for us was 1 in 6 people were food insecure. So while things may be going back to normal, it’s going to take some of the families who are heavily impacted by the pandemic, who were probably already at risk before, it can take them years to recover. And so organizations like Second Harvest and like the other agencies that we work with, you know we’re in this for the long haul, but we’re going to need some community buy-in, and community support to continue feeding — literally feeding — that need.
