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Support Summer Meals in Your Community

Overview

Support Summer Meals in Your Community

Local officials can play an instrumental role in ensuring that children in their communities have access to nutritious meals during out of school hours. Learn more about how you can support summer meals in your community.

What City Leaders Can Do Now

  • Assess the out-of-school time needs of families, along with the need and availability of summer meals in your community.
  • Promote the availability of summer meal programs to the community.
  • Host a convening of city, school and community leaders to identify strategies to address childhood hunger and establish a workgroup to plan and help implement these strategies.
  • Partner with community organizations that serve summer and afterschool meals.
  • Sponsor an Afterschool or Summer Meal Program.
  • Host, or participate in, a community kick-off event to help raise awareness and increase participation.

What City Leaders Can Do Now

Five Things County Leaders Can Do

  • Host a convening of key partners to better understand the summer landscape and identify opportunities.
  • Promote summer meal sites in your county.
  • Start or expand summer lunch programs in county libraries.
  • Encourage county agencies to play a supporting role.
  • Identify opportunities to better serve unincorporated areas and address summer transportation challenges.

Five Things County Leaders Can Do

Help Families Find Summer Meals in your Community

  • USDA Capacity Builder: Use USDA’s new mapping tool to find areas of summer meal needs and service gaps in service in your community.
  • Visit the California Department of Education’s searchable online map here
  • Call 1-866-3HUNGRY (1-866-348-6479) or 1-877-8HAMBRE (1-877-842-6273) en español
  • Download the free mobile app, Range
  • Text the word FOOD to 877-877

Looking for other resources for your family?

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