ROCHESTER, N.Y. — More than 20,000 Rochester kids get free breakfast and lunch during the school year, but only about 8,000 make their way to summer feeding sites in the City when school is out. Foodlink is trying to fill the gap with food trucks that bring meals directly to kids in high-poverty neighborhoods.
Every weekday during the summer, Mr. John drives a Foodlink food truck to parks, playgrounds and splash pads across Rochester to make sure hungry kids get something to eat. “You’re the food truck guy?” a child asked. “Yea, I’m the food truck guy,” John said while passing out meals at Troup Street Park.
Foodlink officially helps feed more than 8,000 Rochester City School District kids in the summer, “a summer camp, a sports camp, an enrichment program, we’ve also got open sites where kids don’t have to be in a program but they have to eat at a certain time and at a certain location and this is kind of bridging the gap for everybody else,” explains Macie McGowan, Foodlink’s Vice President of Community Kitchen.
“If the kids aren’t out, if there’s bad weather, they’ll go to homes where they know that there’s lot of kids or a community champion who might pass out meals for them and they’ll start knocking on doors until they get those meals distributed,” McGowan says.
ARPA dollars have been used to fund these food trucks in targeted high-poverty neighborhoods that have a high concentration of kids.
The trucks try to hit the same neighborhoods around the same time every day for kids who rely on a meal. “Usually, we just get gratitude, even if folks had something for lunch they’re able to maybe have the meal that we provide for dinner,” McGowan says.
In an urban area, the state will only fund summer meals if the kids come to a feeding site. Since this is a mobile program, the cost of it is not covered by state funding.
While Foodlink has been using ARPA money to fund these trucks for the past two summers, that money will run out in September. McGowan says Foodlink is reaching out to private donors in an effort to raise enough money to keep it going next year.
Foodlink is reaching hungry Rochester kids where they are this summer — but the funding won’t last WHEC.com.
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