Dear Friend, Summer should be a time when kids can have fun and enjoy their time off from school — and not worry about where their next meal is coming from. But nearly 86% of children who rely on free or reduced-price lunches during the school year miss out on getting summer meals — often because their communities don’t have the resources or their families aren’t aware of existing programs. We have the potential to change this reality. Today, you can help Share Our Strength ensure every kid can enjoy being a kid this summer. Remember, every dollar you give helps connect a child to 10 meals. And during our summer match campaign, your $75 gift becomes $150, your $100 gift becomes $200, or your $250 gift becomes $500! Your gift to Share Our Strength today can help: Connect kids to existing summer meals programs by raising awareness in their local communities. Expand access to summer meals programs in participating states across the nation. Eliminate barriers like the lack of transportation or safe routes that prevent kids from accessing meals. Teach low-income families how to prepare and shop sensibly for healthy meals on a limited budget. We’re already more than halfway to our $25,000 goal — but we need your support to help us beat it. The Ansara Family Fund of the Boston Foundation is generously matching every dollar you give, but only for a limited time. While we continue to face a tough economy, America’s poorest families are the hardest hit. That’s why it is more critical than ever that you give to Share Our Strength today — plus, you’ll be able to take advantage of the Ansara Family Fund’s special match opportunity to double the power of your gift. Thank you for your continued support of Share Our Strength. Billy Shore Executive Director

©Share Our Strength, 1730 M Street NW, Washington, DC 20036
Web site: www.strength.org
Email: contactus@strength.org
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Inside an Organic Farm

Is organic food worth the cost?

 

U.S. organic farming has grown wildly for the last two decades, but with food demand rising and cash-strapped shoppers pinching pennies, are greener acres still the place to be?

Link to Full Article: 

http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/translating-uncle-sam/stories/is-organic-food-worth-the-cost-0

Why so much hunger?
What can we do about it?
To answer these questions we must unlearn much of what we have been taught.
Only by freeing ourselves from the grip of widely held myths can we grasp the roots of hunger and see what we can do to end it.

This is Chicken?

Jamie Oliver's Food Revoultion

Also visit Jamie Oliver's website for in-depth information on school meals, his food revoltuon and individual perspectives on the quality of school meals.

http://www.jamieoliver.com/us/foundation/jamies-food-revolution

Do new anti-child obesity ads go too far?

This advertisement (http://www.stopchildhoodobesity.com/), part of a "Stop Child Obesity" campaign in Georgia, won some enthusiastic praise for their attention-grabbing tactics. But such ads also have outraged parents, activists and academics who feel the result is more stigma for an already beleaguered group of children.

This new public service campaign against childhood obesity has drawn fire from critics who say it stigmatizes overweight children instead of helping them. Do you agree?

VOTE: http://today.newsvine.com/_news/2011/05/06/6596325-do-new-anti-child-obesity-ads-go-too-far

(Today Show: www.msnbc.com, Fri May 6, 2011 9:09 AM EDT)

Ending Childhood Hunger by 2015

Strategies for Achieving the President’s Goal

During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama announced a goal of of ending childhood hunger in America by the year 2015. Since taking office, President Obama, U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, and other members of the Administration have reiterated that commitment.

FRAC has set out seven essential strategies in Ending Childhood Hunger by 2015: The Essential Strategies for Achieving the President’s Goal (pdf). They focus both on improving and expanding the nation’s nutrition programs, and bolstering the economy and strengthening supports for working families in order to move more out of poverty, the root cause of hunger in this country.
In brief, the seven strategies are:

• Restore economic growth and create jobs with better wages for lower-income workers.
• Raise the incomes of the lowest-income families.
• Strengthen the SNAP/Food Stamp Program.
• Strengthen Child Nutrition Programs.
• Engage the entire federal government in ending childhood hunger.
• Work with states, localities and nonprofits to expand and improve participation in federal nutrition programs.
• Make sure all families have convenient access to reasonably priced, healthy food.

Arkansas Schools Including Weight, BMI On Report Cards

Video: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5467044/

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Children in Arkansas are getting their report card on weight — and the results aren't pretty. The kids are getting heavier, and at earlier ages, not just in this state, but across the country.
It’s not just a weight issue. It’s also a major health issue — a crisis in the view of experts since overweight children are more likely to develop childhood diabetes, hypertension and lung problems.
In order to tackle the problem, the state of Arkansas has taken a bold step to measure the weight profile of every school child in the state. It’s a report card on weight, although researchers cringe at the term because it implies a passing or failing grade.

Processed People

"Celebrated author John Robbins discusses the sad state of the US health care system, and some approaches to consider for fixing it.  This is from the documentary PROCESSED PEOPLE -- more info at http://www.processedpeople.com." (You Tube: http://youtu.be/D6e7v7TwMnY, Retrieved: 5/5/2011)

Wootan: Hunger-Free Kids Act will have big impact

By Tim Carman

Margo Wootan had seen the story I wrote last week about the limited benefits of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, which President Obama signed yesterday. The director for nutrition policy for the Center for Science in the Public Interest said the article read like a foodie wrote it. She was smiling as she said that. There was no malice in her voice, but the subtext seemed clear: My foodie instincts -- and others like mine -- can't grasp the deeper complexities of this new law.
"It’s just too simplistic to judge this bill by the money because there are all of these no-cost reforms," she told me after the presidential signing ceremony at Harriet Tubman Elementary School, "that will help to insure that there is more healthy food in school lunches and breakfasts.”
Wootan has been on the front lines of school lunch reform for years, and she knows this bill like a sixth grader knows how to piece together "lunch" from vending machine junk food. She says there are a number of important provisions in the law that tend to get overlooked by the naysayers who focus too much attention on the tiny six-cent increase in school lunch meals.

Washington State Summer Meal Program from Northwest

Summer Meal Programs

Information courtesy of ParentHelp123, a program of WithinReach
Informational Flyer: English Espanol

There are hungry kids in every county in Washington during the summer

367,000 families in Washington face the threat of hunger every day; 452,076 schoolkids get free or reduced price meals during the school year. Many of them rely on the federal Summer Food Service Program (Summer Meals) that provides free meals and snacks to children and teens to ensure they have enough to eat when school is out.

Helping the Homeless In School and Out

By. Helena Holgersson-Shorter

It did not take long for John Heegard to put the clues together. Valencia McMurray was one of the most promising students in his Advanced Placement U.S.History class at North High School in Minneapolis. But the junior was missing three, four, five days in a row, often just showing up to pass an exam—no small feat, considering the legendary toughness of Heegard’s tests.
Heegard tried but was unable to reach Valencia or her family to check if she was okay. When she did show, he noted her usual wit and intellect were often muted by depression. “It was evident something was up,” Heegard says. “When a kid’s that bright, it doesn’t take long to figure out they’re having some kind of trouble.”

Compassion Fatigue

Thursday, April 21, 2011

My post about breakfast in the classroom resonated with a lot of people, but not in the way I expected. Some readers commented that they couldn't believe that parents can't feed their child before school. Here's one excerpted comment...

I don't really agree with the state feeding children all their meals. This is the responsibility of the parents. Parents can't hack it? Then these kids should be living with someone who can. -Anonymous

Thank you for adding your voice to this discussion. I don't mean to repost the comment to single the person out but it use it as an example how we all feel sometimes. I've blogged about my dad's view of the school lunch program, which is similar to this commenter's.
In our country, 46.3 million people live in poverty, the largest number in 51 years. So yeah, I feel overwhelmed too. There is so much need.

Is Hunger Affecting Your Students?

“When I started sixth grade, the other kids made fun of Brian and me because we were so skinny. . . . At lunchtime, when other kids unwrapped their sandwiches or bought hot meals . . . I told people that I had forgotten to bring my lunch. No one believed me, so I started hiding in the bathroom during lunch hour.

“When other girls came in and threw away their lunch bags in the garbage pails, I’d go retrieve them. I couldn’t get over the way kids tossed out all this perfectly good food.” – Jeanette Walls, The Glass Castle (2005)
Unfortunately, journalist and author Jeannette Walls isn’t the only American student who has struggled with severe, debilitating hunger. According to a recent national survey, 63 percent of teachers surveyed reported an increase in the number of students who regularly come to school hungry.
That number is significant. But does hunger pose any real threats to your students?

Educators Point to Student Hunger as Grave Problem

New survey focuses on the need to feed children to stem classroom problems

By Cynthia McCabe
Tuesday, December 8, 2009 -- More than 60 percent of teachers say they reach into their own pockets to provide food for their students each month, according to a new survey underscoring the damage educators see hunger doing to their students. Whether they work in rural, urban, or suburban environments, hunger is manifesting itself in illness, discipline problems, and lack of focus and engagement.
Roughly the same number say – 62 percent -- they see students enter their classroom without having had enough to eat that morning, the Share Our Strength survey found. No wonder then that more than half believe an in-classroom breakfast program is essential in public schools.

Chicago school bans some lunches brought from home

To encourage healthful eating, Chicago school doesn't allow kids to bring lunches or certain snacks from home — and some parents, and many students, aren't fans of the policy

Students at Little Village Academy often throw

away their entrees and fruit untouched. (Monica Eng/Tribune)

Fernando Dominguez cut the figure of a young revolutionary leader during a recent lunch period at his elementary school.
"Who thinks the lunch is not good enough?" the seventh-grader shouted to his lunch mates in Spanish and English.
Dozens of hands flew in the air and fellow students shouted along: "We should bring our own lunch! We should bring our own lunch! We should bring our own lunch!"
Fernando waved his hand over the crowd and asked a visiting reporter: "Do you see the situation?"

Washington State budget cut could make kids’ stomachs growl

Source: http://www.childrensalliance.org/no-kidding-blog/cut-could-make-kids’-stomachs-growl      

School meals are a critical tool in the fight against childhood hunger. For five days a week, nine or ten months out of the year, kids in low-income families can count on school meals as a source of balanced, reliable nutrition.

Federal standards ensure that growing kids who eat school meals are getting adequate amounts of calcium and protein. Hunger-free kids can concentrate on their schoolwork. Without school meals, low-income families would have to make tight food budgets stretch even further, reducing the quality and amount of food that children and parents eat every day. We are proud that Washingtonians have a long history of supporting school meal programs.
In the 2011 early action supplemental budget, the legislature cut funding for school meals by $3 million.

School food budgets are run on very tight margins. Only a few programs break even. For most districts, serving kids healthy, high quality food costs far more than school meal programs bring in, and districts are forced to cover their costs through levy funds and reserves.
If this cut is carried into the next biennium, school meal programs and kids across the state will be hurt. Schools could be forced to lay off workers and turn to more processed foods with lower labor costs. Kids may not have access to as many fresh fruits and vegetables, and much of the work to improve meal quality – by cooking with higher-cost, more nutritious foods – could be lost. In the worst cases, schools may drop lunch or breakfast programs.

We still have time to save school meal funding. Call or email your legislators. Let them know that school meals are critical to the success of children in every school in every district across Washington.

Filed in:

• 2011 legislative session
• End Childhood Hunger
• Hunger
• No Kidding: Children's Alliance Blog

In Hard Times Kids Should at Least Count on School Means (Bellingham, WA Herald)

An opinion piece in the Bellingham Herald makes the case for protecting school meals:

At a school in Whatcom County not long ago, a second-grade teacher was at her wits end about what to do with a boy who misbehaved constantly, disrupting class and disregarding her requests. It took months before she learned what the problem was: he was hungry. When he began receiving free school breakfast and lunch the behavior problems stopped.

Source: www.childrensalliance.org; http://www.childrensalliance.org/news-events/were-news-hard-times-kids-should-least-count-school-means-bellingham-herald; Posted on: Saturday, March 28, 2009 - 10:14am

Statistics from Share Our Strength: No Kid Hungry

Facts on Childhood Hunger

More than 50 million Americans struggle to put food on the table. More than 17 million of those affected are children.
Hunger impairs our children’s health in significant and long-lasting ways:

• Children who struggle with hunger are sick more often, recover more slowly, and are more likely to be hospitalized.
  
• They are more likely to experience headaches, stomachaches, colds, ear infections and fatigue.
  
• Children who face hunger are more susceptible to obesity and its harmful health consequences as children and as adults.

No Kid Hungry Pledge

Share Our Stength has began a campaign to end childhood hunger in America by 2015.

Take the pledge today.

http://nokidhungry.org/