As food banks across Iowa see demands for their services increase over summer, CommUnity Crisis Services is holding a “Strike Out Hunger” fundraiser to make sure its food bank is able to meet those needs in Johnson County. The annual summer school break is always a challenge for food banks, as kids who receive lunch and often breakfast at school lose access to that reliable source of nutrition for three months, increasing the difficulty of the challenges food-insecure families face.
“Families spend an average of $65 per child on groceries at the supermarket each week,” CommUnity noted in a social media post about its Strike Out Hunger fundraiser. “Once kids are out of school, those costs are sure to go up.”
The Iowa City-based nonprofit also noted that 42.5 percent of children in Iowa rely on school lunches during the academic year.
“Iowans are struggling to provide for their families and our state declined federal funding for children’s meals,” CommUnity Director of Development Julia Winter said in a news release. “It’s up to us as a community to support our neighbors so they can meet their basic needs.”
Iowa is one of 14 Republican-led states that rejected a Biden administration program that provides an extra $40 per child in federal food assistance benefits each month for three months to help cover the increased costs of feeding children who won’t be eating school lunches or breakfasts over the summer break.
That $40 per child would have meant an extra $29 million delivered directly to food insecure Iowa families, through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer for Children program. It would have been loaded directly onto a family’s EBT card. All the state had to contribute to the program was half the cost of administering the temporary benefit increase. Just before Christmas last year, Gov. Reynolds announced Iowa was rejecting the aid for kids over the summer break.
When Reynolds announced on Dec. 22 that she was rejecting state participation in Summer EBT for Children, she said, “Federal COVID-era cash benefit programs are not sustainable and don’t provide long-term solutions for the issues impacting children and families. An EBT card does nothing to promote nutrition at a time when childhood obesity has become an epidemic.”
The governor made her announcement just two weeks after the Food Bank of Iowa said it and its partners in 55 counties had seen record demands for their services over the previous 19 months.
In April, the governor announced her own program to provide food assistance to kids in need over the summer break. Even though Reynolds criticized federal programs as being unsustainable and short-term, the governor is using money the state received as part of the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan Act to pay for her program.
Instead of providing help directly to families, the governor’s program set up a system in which schools and other institutions apply for grants to create summer meal programs. The grants are awarded on a competitive basis. Reynolds appropriated $900,000 for her program. That amount is 3.1 percent of what would have been directly provided to Iowa families under the Biden administration’s program.
Last month, the Reynolds administration announced 38 applicants had been awarded grants by the governor’s program. The grants will add a total 61 new meals sites, which will add to the capacity of the 500 free summer meal sites for kids that existed in 2023. According to the nonprofit Iowa Hunger Coalition, an average number of children who attended one of those 500 meal sites last year was 21,337. The federal program Reynolds rejected would have provided benefits to approximately 240,000 children in the state.
The summer strain on some food banks began as soon as classes ended. The Des Moines Area Religious Council (DMARC) Food Pantry Network experienced a record-setting surge the week after summer vacation started for Des Moines Public Schools.
On Tuesday, June 4, the food pantries “assisted 2,080 unique individuals … setting a single-day record of people assisted,” DMARC said in a news release.
“This marks the first time in the nearly 50-year history of the DMARC Food Pantry Network that the number of unique individuals assisted in one day ever exceeded 2,000,” the nonprofit said.
That record-setting Tuesday followed a Monday that was almost as busy — the third-busiest day in DMARC Food Pantry Network history — and also the second-busiest May DMARC has every experienced.
“Addressing the record levels of food insecurity we are seeing will take a concerted effort across religious communities, the business, government, and nonprofit sector,” DMARC CEO Matt Unger said in a statement earlier this month. “The nonprofit sector and community organizations aren’t capable or designed to do it alone. We are just one piece of the puzzle.”
It’s a sentiment CommUnity echoed in its social media post on Strike Out Hunger: “We need all hands in this summer!”
