Summer Meals Collaborative
Albany, NY
This summer in sites across Upstate New York, kids are enjoying nutritious meals, fun and engaging activities, and opportunities to cool off and have fun together. In our corner of Upstate (the Greater Capital Region), an ecosystem of more than 25 community partners has come together as the Summer Meals Collaborative (“Collaborative”) to ensure that this free program remains accessible to kids in our community.
The USDA’s Summer Food Service Program (SFSP) ensures children can receive the nutrition they need to sustain themselves during the summer months when school is out and they don’t have access to school breakfast and lunch programs. The goal of SFSP is protecting the health of and nutrition of all children. In our country we have an abundance of food; however, there is a mismatch between abundance and accessibility. SFSP allows communities to connect abundance to accessibility by providing funding to purchase local food produce and products that create nourishing meals for kids in the summer months.
The Collaborative functions as a hub that brings together school districts, libraries, art studios, food banks, food pantries, youth clubs, advocacy organizations, museums, and local governments. Together we share information, support each other, and hold ‘Dream Big’ sessions. We ensure that every kid (and family) knows about the free summer meals, we offer nutritious and delicious options, and we create fun and enriching experiences for kids. This program is more than a meal to us: it nourishes kids’ minds, bodies and spirits. Our goal is Make the Greater Capital Region the best place to be a kid in the Summer! How will we do this? By bringing together more partners, creating awesome experiences for kids and families all summer long, and being the place kids want to come to because it’s fun and delicious.
Some of our Dream Big ideas focused on creating onramps into making our region the best place to be a kid in the summer. Two such initiatives that we launched this year are the Summer Meals Ambassador program and topical working groups.
The Summer Meals Ambassador program is designed to increase awareness of the summer meals programs in our community, change the way we talk about the summer meals, and activate community members to join our efforts. In New York state, only 1 in 4 children are participating in this program[1]. We want to make sure that a lack of awareness isn’t the reason for such low participation. We also don’t want stigma to be a barrier to participation. This is where activating community members is our big bet. We want to change the narrative about how people talk about summer meals. It’s a program for everyone, and if you hear about it from your friends, from other parents, from faith communities, from sports clubs, at farmers markets, it sounds like a fun and engaging program that you would want to join.
So who is a Summer Meals Ambassador and how does the program work? Ambassadors are active in the community, and they are easy to spot! Through the strength and network of the Summer Meals Collaborative we have signed up Board Members, dedicated volunteers, corporate partners, Summer Youth Employees, and local elected officials. We have fun and inviting T-shirts that encourage folks to ask us about summer meals. The Ambassadors wear these shirts all over and are ready to share information with anyone that asks about sites in the community, fun activities at sites, upcoming block parties and great resources like Summer EBT. All information is updated regularly on our website and Ambassadors direct folks there for more information. To make sure they have all the information they need and to ensure that everyone is on the same page, we’ve created a training video that explains all of the key points of summer meals and program that people need to know as well as quick ‘cheat sheet’ with links to resources (i.e. how to find a site and SummerEBT). This is a great community building tool with concrete tasks and we are excited to evaluate its potential to help us change the narrative around summer meals.
Our second initiative was to spin out several working groups that focused on specific issues: Increasing Participation in Schenectady, Engaging Experiences for Kids and Families, and Rural Non-Congregant Programs. Monthly Collaborative meetings tend to focus on larger context issues that affect program delivery, brainstorming on expanding our ecosystem and list of action items for the next meeting. In order to dive deeper into specific issues, we began forming smaller working groups. We found that not only did this give us the opportunity to work more intensively and intentionally together, but it was also a great way to bring more organizations into the work with us.
An example of this in action is the RNC working group. Formed initially by collaborative members who were interested and/or planning to offer non-congregant summer meals in rural communities (RNC), it quickly grew. As this was a relatively new implementation model, we had a lot of questions. The first few meetings were mainly cataloging what questions we had and who might know the answers. Those initial questions without immediate answers were how we expanded the working group. Our New York State No Kid Hungry team connected us with partners (sponsors) around the state who were also planning non-congregant programs. These sponsors joined us at working group meetings to share their plans and implementation models. With implementation in full swing, we still plan to check in regularly now to see how everyone is doing, celebrate success and talk through challenges. While we might be operating all over the Empire State, by supporting each other we can make the programs better for all kids and families across New York.
About the Summer Meals Collaborative
United Way of the Greater Capital Region is proud to be a founding member of the Summer Meals Collaborative (SMC). The Collaborative formed in 2013 in recognition that by working together, we can do more to support and sustain nutrition security for kids when school is out. We run over 80 sites across the region and have served 2.34 million meals since 2013.
We initially organized over the question of “how might we maximize the accessibility of the USDA Summer Food Service Program (SFSP) for kids” in the counties that the Collaborative covers. Over the last three years we have moved into a collective impact model where we are working to transform the experience of summer nourishment for kids in our community. We know this program is more than a meal: it nourishes kids’ minds, bodies and spirits and it builds community. It brings so many partners together to provide enriching activities, it provides opportunities for kids to play and socialize, and it builds connections for all participants–kids and staff– to their community.
Today the Summer Meals Collaborative is comprised of 25+ organizations and works in eight counties of the Greater Capital Region. We meet monthly all year long and we are making the Greater Capital Region the Best Place to Be A Kid in the Summer. Our motto is: Come Together. Eat Together. Have Fun Together.
For a list of all the partners and to check out all the good things we have planned for this summer, visit us at: 518SummerMeals.org
[1] Hunger Doesn’t Take A Summer Vacation (FRAC) 2024 Report
