Share Our Strength

Anti-hunger and anti-poverty initiatives: Our strategies to end childhood hunger work together to ensure that kids are fed today and that Our nutritional systems prevent hunger in future generations. Increasing food security supports healthy and resilient children today who will be Our leaders of tomorrow. Eliminating hunger and poverty are critical investments in Our nation.for over 12 years, Share Our Strength's no kid hungry campaign has been the cornerstone of Our goal of ending childhood hunger in america. To ensure that every child can depend on receiving three healthy meals every day of the year, we worked this year to maximize and improve the systems through which kids and families access food. We worked closely with school and community meal providers - providing grants and technical assistance, conducting pilots and research, and listening closely to people and communities facing hunger. We provided more than $23m to school districts and community frontline meal providers. We provided free expertise and resources on how to harness federal waivers and emerging regulations and navigate pandemic-related challenges like supply issues and rising food costs. We produced 13 webinars and other convenings that brought together staff at state agencies, schools, and community organizations and created and distributed 32 free resources to support frontline meal providers and their efforts to connect more kids with meals. We successfully advocated for passage of legislation which allowed for the extension of nationwide child nutrition waivers through the summer of 2022 and the 2022-2023 school year, and we worked to bring the thrifty food plan, the mechanism used to calculate a typical family's "food basket" snap benefits, in line with today's real food costs. We helped to advance state-level policies to expand nutrition access to kids and families across 9 states and launched the mayor's alliance to end childhood hunger with over 120 mayors joining this effort over the fiscal year. We also continued to grow Our efforts focused on connecting kids and families with food and financial resources outside of school. We provided grants to childcare centers, health care centers, and other community organizations working to ensure more caregivers of children under the age of 6 had access to federal nutrition programs and other food resources. These grantees provided 4.2 million meals to families with babies and young children. We established a partnership with the american academy of pediatrics (aap) and supported 7 state aap chapters and their efforts to help pediatricians screen families for food security during wellness visits and connect children and families with wic, snap, and community nutrition resources. To help families of young children purchase and prepare healthy, affordable meals at home, we launched a new digital curricula series cooking matters at home along with new videos, activities, handouts, weekly facebook live sessions, and daily cooking skills classes for kids and caregivers learning together. Cooking matters food skills reached over 957,000 participants online and in person. We partnered with the american public human services association and supported the efforts of six states and localities to streamline data systems with the goal of increasing enrollment in benefit programs like snap and wic.to tackle the root causes of poverty, we launched work centered on helping eligible families receive child tax credit benefits by leading targeted outreach and enrollment in high need communities and increasing access to free, quality tax assistance and legal aid. We reached more than 275,000 families with child tax credit information and obtained more than $13 million for families through the child tax credit and earned income tax credit. In fiscal year 2022 we also started developing Our emerging body of family economic mobility work, which strives to reduce and eliminate the demand for benefit programs, by hiring a managing director to lead that effort as part of Our overall organization strategy.