2024 Summer Food

Are you wanting to expand the impact of your child nutrition program, but find yourselves constrained by limited resources? Explore keys to successful collaborative efforts as well as common pitfalls to avoid. Learn how to leverage your strengths through partnership for deeper impact on child hunger.  

Serving summer meals takes an investment that begins as soon as the summer ends. Why not host a celebration for sponsors and potential sponsors that renews inspiration to make the next summer bigger and better? Hear how our annual SummerPalooza Summit transforms training and planning into a can’t miss event to celebrate and regroup for the next summer.  

Making meal sites memorable doesn’t need to be complicated or expensive. Learn tips and tricks for simple, low-cost ways to serve up fun and nutrition at your site. These strategies can help encourage participation and make summer meals a can’t miss opportunity for kids. 

With the passage of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023, serving non-congregate summer meals in rural areas without access to a congregate site is now a permanent option for states. Offering meals to-go and through delivery has the potential to significantly decrease childhood hunger and increase food security over the summer. Hear about what worked for summer 2023 and what to expect for summer 2024.

Learn how eight sponsors tackled summer Non-Congregate Meals (NCM) in North Carolina. Hear stories from the families who picked up the meals, volunteers who helped, and partners and staff who made success happen. Get tips to make the meal experience fun, memorable and a learning opportunity for those you serve.

School is out, kids are hungry, and your Food Bank is trying to decide if frozen or shelf stable meals are the only options for sponsored sites. Are you considering offering hot and ready meals? From learning recruitment methods for contracted SFSP vendors to road mapping your Food Bank’s success for Summer Food Service Program, let’s get into it!

Delivery of the SFSP by community sponsors can result in patchwork approaches, duplication of efforts, and insufficient reach of many eligible children, particularly where the sponsors are not schools. A unique collaborative of sponsors working together for over 10 years, the Summer Meals Collaborative (SMC), represents an effective model for addressing SFSP challenges.