HUNGER FREE VERMONT INC

Ending childhood hunger: because good nutrition is especially crucial while a young child's brain is developing, hunger free vermont is helping child care providers build nutrition into the core of their programs. We conduct free training for directors and workers representing childcare centers and homes from around the state on how to incorporate better nutrition and more physical activity into their programs. We train early childhood educators about how to identify food insecurities in children and how to talk to families about food access resources by connecting folks to snap and wic. Hunger free vermont also serves as the voice for nutritious meals in childcare in coalitions advocating for improving and expanding early childhood education and childcare capacity in vermont. Since the start of the covid-19 pandemic, we have also helped connect childcare providers to schools as a new source of healthy meals. In 2024 hunger free vermont served as the backbone organization to co-create a strategic plan for what it would take to permanently end childhood hunger in vermont. When complete, the full creating a food secure future for vermont children will include the mix of community-based projects, administrative changes to existing programs, and new policy solutions that we know will be required to fully confront this complex problem-along with a plan for building the broad coalition of families, nonprofits, businesses, and state agencies required to achieve it. Hunger free vermont is vermont's principal anti-hunger authority and leading food security policy advocate. Hunger free vermont's advocacy has led to, among other things, vermont becoming the first state in the country to eliminate reduced-price school meals, becoming the 6th state in the country to enact permanent universal school meals, quadrupling funding for our state's farm to school and early childhood grant program, and securing state funding to incentivize local food purchasing by vermont schools.

School age initiatives: hunger and food insecurity affect many vermont families whose household income makes them ineligible for free school meals, and, because of the stigma they face, many students will not use their school meal program even when they are eligible. In addition, when all students participate, school meal programs are more financially sustainable, can afford to purchase more local food, and can serve higher quality meals. Hunger free vermont has therefore been committed to making school meals a universal and fundamental part of public education at all vermont schools for many years, both by advocating for changes in federal law and by leading a coalition that introduced the first state-level bill for universal school meals in january 2020. Through a robust, community driven effort, we succeeded in having the state legislature pass a one-year state-funded universal school meals program in june of 2022, and in june of 2023 that program was enacted permanently, making vermont the 6th state in the country to provide universal school breakfast and lunch as an essential component of an equitable education for every public school student in vermont, as well as for students at independent schools that opt in to the program. We can now declare success for hunger free vermont's state universal school meals campaign, although we continue to support the national movement to enact universal school meals at the federal level. In the 2023-2024 school year student participation in school breakfast increased 40%, and school lunch participation increased 29% - all while costing 6.5 million (17%) less than what was originally appropriated. During its implementation across the state, 10,000 more students were accurately identified as low-income (a 35% increase), bringing even more federal and state education funding to school districts. Even better, some 2024 changes in the federal rules for afterschool and summer meal programs coupled with new opportunities created by the passage of vermont's universal school meals act have newly made twice as many vermont towns as before eligible to provide free meals at their afterschool and summer programming, dramatically amplifying the impact we are making on ending childhood hunger in our state. Hunger free vermont also provides free, customized coaching and training for schools, towns, and community organizations in establishing, and expanding participation in, all of the federal child nutrition programs they are eligible to operate. These include school breakfast, school lunch, afterschool meals and snacks, and summer meals. These child nutrition programs provide a reliable source of nutrition for school age children, and also reduce family hunger by reducing the amount of money low-income families must spend to provide food for their children. 2023 saw the passage of act 64, vermont's permanent state-subsidized universal school meals program covering all public schools and independent schools that opt in. The calendar year 2024 crossed the first three school years when all public schools in vermont were providing universal school meals. Hunger free vermont's child nutrition initiatives team provided special technical assistance and materials to support schools in communicating this historic change to families, and tracked significant increases in student participation and local food purchasing by schools. Summer meals expansion: because summer is a particularly vulnerable time for food insecure children and families, and because summer meal programs reach only a fraction of all low-income children who need them, hunger free vermont devotes considerable staff time and resources to expanding the number of children who have access to a summer meal site for the full ten weeks of summer vacation each year. We do this through direct technical assistance, community organizing through our hunger councils, and a concerted public outreach and advertising campaign. In the summer of 2024 more than 1 million meals were served to kids and teens at over 275 locations throughout vermont over the summer. The expansions we were able to help summer meal providers make resulted in an increase of 54% from 2023 and more than doubling from pre-pandemic benchmarks and helped vermont lead the country in summer meal program participation according to national reports. Other: it is abundantly clear that emergency food response can only be effectively managed and funded by governmental systems. In 2024, we succeeded in getting food access written into act 143, vermont's comprehensive emergency response and recovery protocol for the first time, along with getting food security organizations added to various state emergency response committees. We also achieved permanent standing and official state government authority for the food access information network, a committee of food security, farm support, and food distribution organizations along with representatives from multiple state governmental agencies that we helped create during the covid-19 pandemic to better systematize statewide food emergency response efforts. Additionally, our work ensured transparency and stakeholder input before any state administrative changes can be made to the 3squaresvt program. Hunger free vermont has been asked to share our advocacy strategies with other anti-hunger organizations around the country, and as a result we have helped many other states achieve some of the same outcomes. Recognizing that the root causes of hunger and food insecurity is a lack of income and the inequitable distribution of economic resources. Hunger free vermont is also committed to better connecting hunger as a social determinant of health within the healthcare system. In collaboration with the healthcare community across the state, hunger free vermont is educating the next generation of providers about the connection between hunger and health, and is supporting implementation of food insecurity screening and the related referral to resources protocols in medical settings.