One in four children in Alabama are food insecure. That means one in four children have no idea where their next meal will come from or when they will eat again.
End Child Hunger in Alabama wants to change that. As a statewide initiative from the Hunger Solutions Institute, End Child Hunger has launched the Every Meal Matters campaign to educate the public on statewide hunger problems.
“We put together a task force of key state leaders from government, nonprofit organizations, individuals and academic institutions who wanted to address the issue of food insecurity,” said Harriet Giles, managing director of Every Meal Matters. “In a land of plenty, to have any child hungry is a tragedy.”
The task force was created in 2012 and has since grown in size and capabilities.
“The first year we were just getting our goals in place,” Giles said. “We came up with a set of goals that people of all different political persuasions could agree on. We went from the micro level of getting food to families, to the macro level of stabilizing food in Alabama.”
The campaign’s current focus has been on providing children food in the summers when they can’t receive free or reduced lunches at school.
“Kids can come to a certain location and get a lunch or breakfast,” Giles said. “We work closely with the food and nutrition service in Atlanta that is part of the United States Department of Agriculture.”
The biggest problem was many of sites were too far from children’s homes for them to be able to get lunches. Giles said they worked hard to improve upon that problem.
“We made a strategic effort to help the state Department of Education to be able to up more sites and have more people involved,” Giles said. “In three years, our summer feeding has doubled.”
Kayla Ackin, graduate assistant for End Child Hunger in Alabama, said the campaign’s primary goal now is to rally others to get behind the cause.
“The campaign is supposed to really educate the public and get the message out there,” Ackin said. “We want to build public will to end hunger.”
Ackin said she hopes they will be able to lower the margin of food insecure children in Alabama.
“We want to move Alabama to the top 25 percent of food secure states,” Ackin said. “We’ve been doing that through programs like the ‘Meal in a Backpack.’”
Giles said she believes so many problems stem from a lack of proper nutrition in children.
“It starts with health. It can be bad for developing. Poor health makes it hard to learn, so you don’t learn as well and aren’t educated, and then it becomes a job for employees. There are places in the U.S. that are almost third world,” Giles said. “Some of the most obese kids are the ones that are the most food insecure.”
Many Auburn University faculty and departments have come out in support of this issue.
“The athletics department and Jay Jacobs have made ending child hunger one of their directives,” Giles said. “Jason Dufner has a charity dedicated to ending child hunger as well. And Auburn Tiger Dining has agreed to help prepare and refrigerate the food to deliver in the summer.”
Every Meal Matters is teaming up with the Jason Dufner Charitible Foundation to host a 5k run April 2.
“It will hopefully get the word out and get students more involved and aware of hunger,” Giles said.
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