Friday, August 06, 2010

Food for Good

Great story in yesterday's edition of The Dallas Morning News about our partnership with the U. S. Department of Agriculture, AmeriCorps and PepsiCo to provide hundreds of thousands of additional summer meals to low-income children in Dallas.

Here's a taste of the report by Ananda Boardman:


Food for Good summer program serves 200,000th meal in Dallas

Htee Kushee remembers running from soldiers in her native Burma as a 3-year-old.

Htee still runs, but now she and her friends gather twice a day at the Towne Center Apartments in northeast Dallas, where their motivation is happiness instead of fear. Thanks to the Food for Good Initiative, a partnership between PepsiCo Inc. and Central Dallas Ministries, 10-year-old Htee and other North Texas youngsters get a free breakfast and lunch each weekday.

"I like it," Htee said simply.

Texas ranks second to Mississippi as the state with the most kids at risk to go hungry each day, according to Feeding America, a Chicago-based hunger relief organization.

Between 300,000 and 400,000 children receive free or reduced-price lunches in the Dallas area during the school year, but during the summer, access to such meals is severely limited.

For the second consecutive year, the Food for Good program has helped fill that void.

On Wednesday, it served its 200,000th meal of the summer, and officials expect to do more.

To read the entire report click here.

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