VISTA and the USDA can help nourish your summer programs

AmeriCorps sent this bulletin at 03/07/2014 11:34 AM EST

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Fight hunger this summer with VISTA and the USDA

Does your AmeriCorps VISTA project offer summer programming for youth? If so, consider adding the Summer Food Service Program to your offerings. This USDA program is a natural fit for many AmeriCorps VISTA projects and strengthens program participation, while benefitting the community by feeding children during summer months.

2014 Summer Food Service Program Webinar Series. Promote. Sponsor. Serve. Volunteer.

Every summer when school ends, millions of kids and teens are at risk of going hungry because they no longer have access to the free and reduced-price meals they received when they were in school. The Summer Food Service Program provides meal reimbursements to organizations that serve meals at approved sites where youth gather during the summer months. SFSP currently helps to alleviate the summer need but we need your enthusiasm to make sure that it is accessible for every hungry child.

Nationwide, SFSP is underutilized with only about 16% of eligible kids participating

VISTA is encouraging every VISTA site that is running summer programming for youth to also consider incorporating Summer Food Service Program participation at the locations where youth gather during the summer.

To get started, please join the USDA for any of the upcoming interactive webinars about the Summer Food Service Program (SFSP) to learn how you can get involved with this wonderful program that will bolster your summer programming.

Combined Summer Meals with elders and youth are a great match through programs such as the Child and Adult Care Food Program

While not every VISTA anti-poverty project is a fit for this initiative, we hope that you will explore the options that make sense for your community whether that is for your organization to run a Summer Food site yourself or for you to help promote the sites of others.

As we have seen in past years, VISTAs have been able to increase the number of meals served at Summer Food sites by the hundreds of thousands by conducting outreach, developing educational summer learning loss prevention activities, building partnerships and creating other resources that will help create new Summer Food sites or to grow existing ones.

Many summer sites can geographically qualify for free meals for any youth

Find out how to get started fighting summer hunger right now by signing up for one of the USDA's informational webinars listed below.

You can also learn more about how to become a SFSP site by clicking here: http://www.fns.usda.gov/sfsp/how-become-sponsor

USDA Summer Food Webinar Series sign up (https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/SFSP2014):

March 11 - Be a Summer Food Champion This Winter

March 20 – Summer Food Service Program and Child and Adult Care Food Program 101

March 25 - Utilizing Grants & Unique Partnerships to Serve More Summer Food

March 27 - How Can You Solve Your Summer Food Transportation Problems?

April 3 - Finding Ways to Keep Schools Involved in Summer Food

April 9 - Make Your Summer Food Site the Talk of the Town


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