Hunger Free Vermont

Child nutrition initiatives school age initiatives: Hunger Free Vermont provides Free, customized coaching and training for schools, towns, and community organizations in establishing, and expanding participation in, all of the federal child nutrition programs they are eligible to operate. These include school breakfast, school lunch, afterschool meals and snacks, and summer meals. These child nutrition programs provide a reliable source of nutrition for school age children, and also reduce family Hunger by reducing the amount of money low-income families must spend to provide food for their children. Calendar year 2022 crossed two school years when schools were returning to full in-person instruction and cafeteria-based meal service within the context of the ongoing covid-19 pandemic, along with the implementation of a one-year state-funded universal school meals program beginning in the fall of 2022. Hunger Free Vermont's child nutrition initiatives team provided special technical assistance and materials to support schools in communicating all of these changes to families, and to help schools navigate meal service changes. Summer meals expansion: because summer is a particularly vulnerable time for food insecure children and families, and because summer meal programs reach only a fraction of all low-income children who need them, Hunger Free Vermont devotes considerable staff time and resources to expanding the number of children who have access to a summer meal site for the full ten weeks of summer vacation each year. We do this through direct technical assistance, community organizing through our Hunger councils, and a concerted media and advertising campaign. Throughout the pandemic, from 2020 through 2022, we helped communities throughout Vermont take advantage of special summer meal program flexibilities. The expansions we were able to help summer meal providers make resulted in Vermont breaking all previous records for the number of Free summer meals provided to children in each of these three years, and helped keep Vermont's level of child Hunger to one of the lowest in the nation. Universal school meals campaign: Hunger and food insecurity affect many Vermont families whose household income makes them ineligible for Free school meals, and, because of the stigma they face, many students will not use their school meal program even when they are eligible. In addition, when all students participate, school meal programs are more financially sustainable, can afford to purchase more local food, and can serve higher quality meals. Hunger Free Vermont has therefore been committed to making school meals a universal and fundamental part of public education at all Vermont schools for many years, both by advocating for changes in federal law and by leading a coalition that introduced the first state-level bill for universal school meals in january 2020. Thanks to federal waivers during the covid-19 pandemic, all public schools in Vermont began offering universal school meals in march 2020. Through the pandemic, Hunger Free Vermont continued working to make this change permanent so no child will ever lose access to school meals. Through a robust, community driven effort, we succeeded in having the state legislature pass a one-year state-funded universal school meals program in june of 2022, and in june of 2023 that program was enacted permanently, making Vermont the 6th state in the country to provide universal school breakfast and lunch as an essential component of an equitable education for every public school student in Vermont, as well as for students at independent schools that opt in to the program. Hunger Free Vermont's state universal school meals campaign is now complete, although we continue to support the national movement to enact universal school meals at the federal level. Early childhood nutrition: because good nutrition is especially crucial while a young child's brain is developing, Hunger Free Vermont is helping child care providers build nutrition into the core of their programs. We conduct Free trainings for directors and workers representing childcare centers and homes from around the state on how to incorporate better nutrition and more physical activity into their programs. We train early childhood educators about how to identify food insecurities in children and how to talk to families about food access resources by connecting folks to snap and wic. Hunger Free Vermont also serves as the voice for nutritious meals in childcare in coalitions advocating for improving and expanding early childhood education and childcare capacity in Vermont. Since the start of the covid-19 pandemic, we have also helped connect childcare providers to schools as a new source of healthy meals. Although the waivers that allowed schools to serve meals to all children 18 and under for Free have ended, we continue to collaborate with the agency of education to help streamline the process of schools being able to vend meals to childcare programs. In 2022 we published the results of a year-long study on the true costs of, and barriers to, providing meals and snacks in early childhood settings. We learned that the current models, including the available federal child and adult care food program, simply do not cover the full costs of providing nutritious meals, making childcare meal programs unsustainable in most cases. Based on this study, we are building a statwide coalition to identify community-based and policy solutions, as we continue to advocate for meal program flexibilities that would decrease barriers to childcare nutrition programming at the federal level.

Advocacy and community engagement: Hunger Free Vermont raises awareness about Hunger and its solutions and supports communities and local leaders in taking action to end Hunger through community engagement initiatives, including through the Hunger councils of Vermont. The 10 Hunger councils are made up of over 1,000 local leaders who are committed to learning about Hunger and working to address Hunger in their communities and the state by coordinating efforts and sharing information.the Hunger councils also respond to community needs and are a forum for highlighting and addressing emerging challenges in communities. The Hunger councils became critical regional forums for planning emergency response to the covid-19 pandemic. Most of the councils met bi-weekly or monthly throughout 2022, and helped to identify community food needs, locate and coordinate volunteers for food distribution efforts, and share local needs with state and federal authorities. Advocacy initiatives: Hunger Free Vermont is Vermont's principal anti- Hunger authority and leading food security policy advocate. Hunger Free Vermont's advocacy has led to, among other things, Vermont becoming the first state in the country to eliminate reduced-price school meals, becoming the 6th state in the country to enact permanent universal school meals, quadrupling funding for our state's farm to school and early childhood grant program, securing state funding to incentivize local food purchasing by Vermont schools, and ensuring transparency and stakeholder input before any state administrative changes can be made to the 3squaresvt program. Hunger Free Vermont has been asked to share our advocacy strategies with other anti-hunger organizations around the country, and as a result we have helped many other states achieve some of these same outcomes. Recognizing that the root causes of Hunger and food insecurity is a lack of income and the inequitable distribution of economic resources, in 2022 Hunger Free Vermont joined state-level coalitions in support of paid family leave, creating a state child tax credit, expanding tanf benefits, and securing state funding for meals on wheels and the emergency food network to begin to address the dramatic increase in food insecurity in Vermont caused by the ending of federal pandemic economic support programs. Food as medicine: Hunger Free Vermont is also committed to better connecting Hunger as a social determinant of health within the healthcare system. In collaboration with the healthcare community, Hunger Free Vermont is educating the next generation of providers about the connection between Hunger and health and is implementing food insecurity screening and referral protocols in medical settings.

Food security initiatives: Hunger Free Vermont improves access to and participation in 3squaresvt (known nationally as snap) which is one of the most reliable, consistent, and dignified means to prevent Hunger in the us. Snap provides funds eligible low-income households can use to buy food to prepare at home. Hunger Free Vermont works with state and community partners in every Vermont county to increase awareness of the program, remove barriers to participation, and train hundreds of service providers who do application assistance to ensure all those who are eligible are able to participate. Since Hunger Free Vermont began working on improving access, participation in 3squaresvt has increased by more than 80%. Our state is now nationally recognized for connecting those at the lowest income levels to snap. Our food security initiatives team also works to expand 3squaresvt use at farmers markets, raises public awareness about the value of 3squaresvt, and engages public support for protecting this biggest food safety net from harmful federal administrative changes and cuts. During the covid-19 pandemic, we focused on getting accurate information about 3squaresvt and other ways to get healthy food out to hundreds of thousands of vermonters, including those newly unemployed who had never before faced Hunger. We also successfully advocated for important covid-era expansions of 3squaresvt, like ensuring access for college students and increased benefit amounts during unprecedented levels of Hunger. These pandemic-era program flexibilities ended in 2022, requiring us to develop trainings and outreach materials to explain the reductions in benefits and changes in program rules to participants, application assistors, and state legislators. We also undertook the expansion of translated materials we provide to make sure that Vermont's refugee communities know how to access this critical nutrition program. Abenaki food security / food sovereignty projects: in 2020, Hunger Free Vermont began building relationships with the leaders of the four state- recognized abenaki tribes in Vermont, with the goal of seeking funding to directly regrant to the tribes for their own community food sovereignty projects. In the first three years of this ongoing project, we have raised close to 300,000 that has been granted directly to the tribes. In addition, we are working with the tribes' community-based nonprofits to provide culturally specific information about the federal nutrition programs that can contribute to improved food security for tribal citizens, who have the highest rates of Hunger and poor health outcomes linked to food insecurity of any group in Vermont.