"Food for Good"

Central Dallas Ministries has enjoyed a great partnership with PepsiCo's "Food for Good" initiative for a second summer.  Last year we partnered in a mobile lunch delivery effort with PepsiCo.  This summer we rolled out a fully developed mobile delivery strategy in Dallas, while PepsiCo replicated the pilot program in Chicago with Catholic Charities as a partner. 

The whole deal is way beyond cool and exciting! 

Here's the report as we close in on the last three weeks of the joint effort that linked CDM's AmeriCorps team, PepsiCo and the Texas Department of Agriculture, the Illinois Department of Agriculture and the U. S. Department of Agriculture.

• The summer feeding program created 100 summer jobs and has now served more than 200,000 meals in Dallas, Texas across 10 routes with 3 weeks to go!

• We kicked off a mobile summer feeding program in Chicago on July 12 that has served more than 10,000 meals across 2 routes.

• We have 6 farm stands up and running in Dallas that, in just a few weeks, have profitably provided more than 20,000 servings of fruits & vegetables and valuable business skills to 30+ volunteers.

• The students at Paul Quinn College here in Dallas continue to run a fully operational urban farm, including harvesting and selling more than 100 pounds (!) of fruits & vegetables last week.

More details to come.  We're making very significant progress!

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.