Texas Hunger Initiative and Partners to Host Summer Meals for Kids Block Parties
Free Summer Meals for Kids Served at More Than 1,000 Sites across Dallas County
Charting the Course, the Texas Hunger Initiative and other partners have joined together to raise awareness around the free Summer Meals program in order to combat childhood hunger and obesity by hosting several Summer Meals Block Parties with area Summer Meals sponsors.
Summertime should be a time for food, friends and fun, but for one in four Dallas County children, the summertime can be a time of fear, increased financial burden, and hunger. In Dallas County, there are over 172,000 children and teens that are food insecure. During the school year, the majority of these children receive free or reduced-priced meals while attending school, but in the summertime, these same students are at gravest risk. Children that lack resources to eat healthy food often subsist on unhealthy snacks or junk food, which increases the risk of obesity.
The USDA-funded Summer Meals program is designed to fill that healthy meal gap in the summertime when children are out of school. It’s administered by our own Texas Department of Agriculture, and allows schools, nonprofits, churches and agencies to provide Summer Meals. Sponsors provide meals at Summer Meals sites all over—from school campuses to churches, nonprofits and apartments. Dallas County has one of the highest numbers of Summer Meals sites of any county in the country—more than 1,400, in fact. But in light of that fact, only about 14 percent of those kids and teens that receive free and reduced-priced meals during the school year participate in Summer Meals.
To continue to raise awareness and participation in this critical program, Charting the Course will be having a series of block parties the week of August 4-8, which will include games, activities, and of course, healthy meals for all attending children and teens.
Summer Meals Block Parties
Monday August 4 11:45 AM (Arcadia Park Library)
Monday August 4 11:00 AM (Larry Johnson Rec Center)
Tuesday, August 5 11:30 AM (Calvary Baptist Church)
Wednesday, August 6 11:30 AM (Juanita Craft Rec Center)
Wednesday, August 6 3:00 PM (Sierra Vista Apartments)
Thursday, August 7 11:00 AM (Irving Family YMCA)
Thursday, August 7 2:00 PM (Spring Hill Apartments)
The Texas Hunger Initiative (THI) is a collaborative, capacity-building project, housed in the Baylor University School of Social Work, which develops and implements strategies to end hunger through policy, education, community organizing and community development. THI seeks to make the state food secure by ensuring that every individual has access to three healthy meals a day, seven days a week. THI convenes federal, state and local government stakeholders with nonprofits, faith communities and business leaders to create an efficient system of accountability that increases food security in Texas. Texas Hunger Initiative’s Central Office is housed in and works in partnership with the Baylor School of Social Work in downtown Waco. We also have 12 regional offices that fight hunger on a local level in Amarillo, Austin, Dallas, El Paso, Fort Worth, Houston, Lubbock, McAllen, San Angelo, San Antonio, Tyler and Waco.
