Summer Meals Truck Delivers in NYC
Posted by Josh Wachs on Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Last Friday we met with key executives from the New York City Department of Education to discuss expanding our partnership around summer meals and school breakfast.
New York City public schools serve close to 1 million meals a day to students during the school year. In fact, the NYC school system is second only to the US Armed Forces when it comes to the volume of food purchased, prepared and served.
But during the summer, when school is out, only about a third of students who eat free or reduced priced meals during the school year actually receive summer meals.
One of the major challenges is awareness: how do you reach kids and families during the summer, when you can’t rely upon classroom time to spread the message?
We all know there are few sounds sweeter to kids than that old summer staple, the ice cream truck. So this summer we’ve partnered with SchoolFood — the largest school food service provider in the United States — and the New York City Department of Education to pilot a Summer Meals truck, bringing the food to where the kids are.
The truck delivers nutritious lunches to places where kids congregate during the summer, like parks and playgrounds in underserved communities. The truck is branded to be easily recognizable, boasts a megaphone to broadcast the message of free summer meals for kids, and even plays a catchy summer meals jingle!
After a great meeting with Deputy Chancellor Kathleen Grimm, Eric Goldstein, Chief Executive of The Office of School Support Services for the NYC Department of Education, Jorge Collazo, Executive Chef of NYC SchoolFood, and Joel Berg, Executive Director, NYC Coalition Against Hunger, we received a welcome surprise. Our Summer Meals truck came around to say hello!
It was actually the truck’s first day on the road and it had quickly distributed all 300 meals aboard at parks in Brooklyn earlier in the day. As you can see from the pictures below, it is a retrofitted truck, with window service and plenty of space to store meals in refrigerated compartments.
Share Our Strength’s NYC Director Jenny Dirksen and I are very excited about this great step forward for this year. We’ll be tracking the progress of the truck this summer and measuring its impact as we think further about creative ways to make sure kids get the nutritious food they need during the summer.
Do you have a creative idea for summer meals? Tell us about it!
July 20, 2010 | 2 comment(s) | Tags: new york city, no kid hungry, summer meals
Comments
2 reader comments so far.
We have just started a program for mobile delivery of lunches to kids in local apartment complexes next summer. Presently, we are meeting with the parents in those complexes that qualify to enlist their support and assistance in planning a healthy menu that their kids will eat, advertising this program at the complex, and helping us distribute it next summer. We will deliver these meals at about 6 sites a day, hopefully, delivering 75-100 lunches at each site. We tried this mobile delivery system last summer, but we didn't include enlisting parents as part of the program. This year we will. We have also enlisted teens to volunteer every day to include healthy recreational activities that will attract these kids. Between the parents and the volunteers we hope to dramatically increase our numbers.
Posted by Dean Smith on November 5, 2010
Awareness is not a problem in our Brooklyn neighborhood - but enough food is. Less than half of the kids who queue up at our local distribution site (Kosciusko Pool) get lunch - there are daily not enough meals. The toddler pool is the farthest from the distribution area - and its heartbreaking to see the youngest kids rarely end up with a lunch. What is the problem here? Sees from the outreach campaign that volume of food is not the problem.
Posted by melanie loebig on July 18, 2011
Post a comment
All fields are required (your e-mail address will not be displayed)