Get Involved - has information about a number of ways that you can learn about and join efforts to end hunger: through donations, volunteer work, advocacy, public education, or a unique community-based method of finding and linking the unique skills of local community residents (Asset-Based Community Development).

Program Review

The Summer Food service Proqram (SFSP), despite recent qains locally, is still severely underutilized by Sacramento' s children.

The SFSP is a federal child nutrition program managed at the national level by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Unlike many other states, where the state Departments of Education manage the SFSP, in California, the USDA manages and monitors the program directly through local sponsors.

SFSP provides free meals to any child 18 and under, but service sites are selected within neighborhoods that have high concentrations of low-income families. Therefore, SFSP is targeted to children living at or below poverty levels.

Locally the largest sponsor of the SFSP is the City of Sacramento. Through its Department of Parks and Community Services Office of Human Services the City has achieved relative success in recent years in expanding access to summer lunches and snacks.

For example, during the summer of 1991 the city's SFSP sponsor increased participation over the summer of 1990, serving 33 percent more lunches and 109 percent more nutritious snacks. The chart below illustrates the results of the city's planned efforts to expand access to SFSP meals and snacks:

In part because of this successful expansion of local participation in the SFSP, the city projects a total federal reimbursement of $232,898 for the meals and snacks served during the summer of 1991.

Despite these achievements, however, many of Sacramento's hungry children do not have access to these free summertime meals and snacks. According to the city's SFSP coordinator, their program served only 7.1 percent of the county's children who qualified for free or reduced-price school lunches during the 1990-91 school year. Continued efforts are needed for expanding accessability to the nutritious summertime meals and snacks provided by SFSP.

[Top]