Child Nutrition Reauthorization: What It Will Do and What You Can Do To Help
Posted by Michael McKenna on Friday, July 30, 2010
What do an apple, a Senator, and Share Our Strength have in common?
They all care about making sure child nutrition reauthorization passes the Senate and the House and becomes law.
Yesterday, Senator Blanche Lincoln, Chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, held a press conference about the Senate version of the child nutrition bill, called the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010. Click here to read a PDF of the bill.
Lincoln was joined by several of her senate colleagues, representatives from many anti-hunger groups and cheerful kids from the Berkeley Community Center in Northern Virginia (pictured above), including a little girl in an apple costume. I, along with other Share Our Strength staff, went to the press conference and proudly held No Kid Hungry signs to show our support for a vote on the bill.
The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act would add an additional $4.5 billion dollars for federal nutrition programs, including school meals and WIC. If passed, there are four other notable things this bill would do:
- It would create the first increase in the federal reimbursement rate for school mealsin 4 decades!
- It would expand the afterschool supper program so that kids in need can get three nutritious meals a day.
- It eliminates barriers that keeps kids from nutritious food. One of the barriers for eligible kids is the paperwork their parents have to fill out. This bill helps address that problem by allowing for kids to automatically qualify for free or reduced-price meals at school when mom or dad signs them up for Medicaid or SNAP benefits.
- And lastly and significantly, the bill would not add to the national deficit because the Senate Agriculture Committee identified budget offsets to cover the cost of the bill.
The Senators pointed out that an investment today will benefit millions of children – and the entire country – for a lifetime. Senator Lugar, Republican from Indiana, rightly said, “For many children from low income homes, food from child nutrition programs may provide the bulk of the nutrition they receive during the day. Children have no choice in their family’s circumstances, and these meals are critical to their chance for success and better health.”
But guess what? The current law that governs child nutrition expires on September 30 of this year. If the Senate does not schedule a vote on the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, those vital investments in children’s health and nutrition won’t happen for another whole year. That’s one extra year of a child’s life that they might go without the support they need to thrive.
You can make sure that doesn’t happen! Call your senator today. Tell them that you support the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act and want them to help pass this important piece of legislation in August.
More information on the press conference can be found here.
July 30, 2010 | 1 comment(s) | Tags: Child Nutrition Reauthorization, no kid hungry
Comments
1 reader comment so far.
Hi Michael. First of all, good work. this type of work is super important, and could only be pushed forward by passionate people. Making sure the people are not hungry, as far as i am concerned, is the number one in the priority list of our goals. First the children, then the rest, of course. The thing is, we got more then rnough food, but poor distrebution. Hack, there is enough food in the USA alone to feed the entire world daily, yet africa starvs... anyway, if you read posts like vegetables nutrition blog, we can learn that real nutrition-full healthy food is not so expansive, and so feeding the people shouldn't be a hard task, if there is enough understanding and passion aimed into it. Good luck and god bless!
Posted by vegetables nutrition on September 4, 2010
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