When I think back to summers when I was in school, I think about bike rides, cookouts and fresh fruit. For many children in the community served by the Capital Area Food Bank, summer means a break from the structure of school and, sadly, the loss of a steady stream of meals.
This past summer, the Capital Area Food Bank’s Food For Kids Department received a grant from Sodexo’s Feeding Our Future program. This grant funded a large portion of our Weekend Bag program over the summer. Weekend Bag provides meals on weekends for children who may not have stable sources of food during weekends. Our partners tell us how especially important these meals are during the summer months when school is out of session.
This important grant helped us distribute over 5,000 Weekend Bags this past summer at 28 sites across the food bank’s service area. These bags provided over 25,000 meals to our area’s children and their families.
Sodexo partners with us not only through this valuable program, but also through volunteering at the food bank. It has provided volunteers for our Cooking Matters program and even sent a team to help us in the Food For Kids Department get ready for the new school year. They packed school supplies that were distributed to over 6,000 children in our community!
Thank you to Sodexo for making this summer a time for all of our community’s children to remember without hunger.