Detroit Gallery Packages Meals with Artist-Designed Coloring Book for Kids

Food insecure children in Seattle amount to the hundreds of thousands in number. Local nonprofit, Food Lifeline’s Kids Café, has become an accessible option for poor children to receive free nutritious meals and snacks. The operation has expanded to 18 different branches across Seattle in locations where children go for enrichment and is currently looking into establishing locations in rural areas.

A community kitchen in Alexandra, South Africa, uses donations from local businesses, individuals, and a food bank to make meals for children who are not getting enough nutrition from government assistance. Local women volunteer to cook the meals and are able to eat and take home leftovers after all the children are fed.

The ADAMÂ Bakery trains and employs refugees in Uganda to make bread. This way they can earn a living while also feeding unaccompanied minors in the refugee settlements.

Communities are creating networks to fill in food security gaps for children. In cities like Jackson, Mississippi, and Atlanta, Georgia, community groups, churches, and nonprofits are working to provide summer meals to children who rely on lunch programs during the school year. Closed schools create a barrier to resources for many families that depend on them. Organizations like Feeding America and the Georgia Nutritional Services draw from USDA Summer Food Service Program funding to address the shortfall in summertime support.

Mobile delivery increases the accessibility of summer meal programs for children who rely on food assistance during the school year. Across the country, multiple initiatives by local governments, schools, nonprofits, and faith-based organizations are working to extend participation in summer meal programs. Many of these programs receive support from the USDA, but additional grants have allowed organizations to extend their range of delivery, as have partnerships with food trucks and transportation services.

Funded by a grant from the Colorado Health Foundation, several nonprofits are working to fill the summer food security gap for children who rely on school meals. Several groups, including Pine River Shares and Friends with Food, have partnered with the Education Literacy Health and Inspiration Community Center to provide free lunches to needy schoolchildren. When the school district ceased operating the meal program, ELHI took over the operations, serving the children of families who already come to the center for other activities.

Women in resource-challenged households in Kano, Nigeria, are turning to a communal tradition rooted in Hausa culture to make meals that meet their families' needs. They pool their money together to buy ingredients, cook together, and equally distribute portions of the meals.

Nonprofits are spreading knowledge of breadfruit trees to communities facing food insecurity around the world because it is a reliable, resilient crop that produces abundant yields. Local farmers are taking an agroecology approach to planting the trees — which produce a nutritious, potato-like fruit — with other mixed crops so the plants can benefit from each other.

The Transitional Learning Center provides children ages four to 14 with free education, school supplies, and one meal per day to not only encourage school attendance but to also address the issue of malnutrition. The beauty of the Center is that it’s a semi-permanent structure that can be moved to different locations where there may be school children in need. Since the Center was formed, over nine million students from 54,619 schools have benefited from the program.

Using biochar to plant crops on soil contaminated with lead reduces the amount of lead the crops soak up.