Four Million Meals, and a New Challenge Starting September 1

Ask most people what a kid does on the weekend and you will hear about soccer and cartoons.

Ask a teacher in a low income San Diego neighborhood and you might hear something very different. Some of their students eat well Monday through Friday. Then the school week ends.

School meals cover weekdays. Friday afternoon to Monday morning is the gap. That is the whole problem in one sentence and I had never thought about it that way until somebody said it to me.

The people closing it

It’s All About the Kids® Foundation has been at this since 2004. Their mission, in their words, is to "bridge the weekend food insecurity gap for children that live in impoverished neighborhoods." Their Feed the Kids program launched in 2017 and has now delivered more than four million nutritious meals.

Four million is a number so big it stops meaning anything, so here is the part that got me.

Fifteen dollars covers dinner every night for a child for a month. Twenty five dollars covers 35 meals. That is what a lot of us spend on lunch in a week, turned into a month of dinners for a kid who needed them.

They also run FOOD HELP NOW SD, a free San Diego County directory that pulls food pantries, CalFresh and WIC help, recipes, job training and GED resources into one place. Because need almost never shows up by itself, and a family in a hard month should not have to go find eight different websites.

The new challenge opens September 1

The foundation is launching a new challenge on September 1, timed to the start of the school year. Details go live that day and we will be sharing it the second it drops.

If you have been waiting for an easy, obvious way to do something useful for kids in your own county, watch for this one.

Why I am the one telling you

We were in one of their classrooms recently for a hands on day, alongside Trash Panda and Vons, where students built real healthy eating guides. Kids presenting to each other, arguing about snack choices, completely into it. It was one of my favorite days of the year and I am not being polite about that.

It is the same thing that struck me watching Paws Plumbing hand over a truck bed of dog food. The organizations doing the most good almost always have the least marketing support. They pour everything into the mission and nothing into being seen, so the people who would gladly help never find out they exist.

That is backwards. So this one gets our time, our cameras and our channels.

Three things you could do this week

Give $15. One month of dinners for one child. It takes ninety seconds and you will feel better all day.

Watch for the September 1 challenge and share it. Reach is the one thing a nonprofit can almost never buy, and it costs you nothing to hand them yours.

Volunteer a day. The classroom and distribution days are good ones to be part of, and you get to meet the kids the numbers are actually about. Highly recommend.

Four million meals happened one small decision at a time. September 1 is a good day to make one.