Food for Kids.
Some children can never be sure of receiving three meals a day, often filling their tummies from the school water fountain. KidsCan StandTall believes all children deserve to have full tummies. The Food for Kids programme currently provides free food at school for over 20,000 financially disadvantaged children a week (this equates to 663,000 meals a year). This programme has had a remarkable effect on improving learning ability and concentration levels in class.
The programme delivers food items that are the result of consultation with dieticians, doctors, principals and teachers aimed at ensuring that what we supply is of appropriate nutritional value. It is a crisis food programme not a breakfast programme.
Food for Kids is set up to ensure the most vulnerable children are reached. We learned about the difficulties in administering school food programmes from schools themselves. They alerted us to the issues around finding and maintaining volunteers to prepare and serve the food and having fresh food delivered regularly. Our solution is to provide tasty food items that are easy to deliver, store and distribute at any time of the day in a discrete way so children are not stigmatised.
By making these supplies available to principals on an as-needed basis, we can encourage hungry children to attend school and enable them to participate fully.
A big thank you to our Food for Kids partners:
