By Caitlyn Meisner | Staff Writer
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) granted $5 million to the Baylor Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty (BCHP) to continue its Meals-to-You program and to permanently scale its impact outside of the states it serves, including Texas, New Mexico, Alaska and Utah.
The Meals-to-You program is a pilot program launched in 2019 and initially funded for three years. Aiming to provide nourishing meals to rural families during the summer, the program delivers boxes of meals and snacks that exceed the nutritional value outlined by the USDA to children’s doors — ready for anyone to eat with minimal cooking required.
According to Jeremy Everett, founder and executive director of the BCHP, during the summer of 2022, the Meals-to-You program was extended due to rising inflation and the end of pandemic relief programs. The USDA made the extension possible with a $5 million grant.
Everett said the grant permanently funds the Meals-to-You program, and the department also added another $1.5 million due to the increased demand for meal assistance in rural communities.
According to Lori Kanitz, project director of federal grants for the BCHP, the collaborative vendors — including McLane Global and Pepsi Co. — craft menus that are tailored to the local areas they serve.
“We work with the food distributor to have menus that have variety, are kid-friendly and fun to eat,” Kanitz said. “Often, if the child is the one opening the box, it needs to be ready to eat.”
Everett said he commended previous efforts made by the federal and state governments to combat food insecurity; however, he said he knew there was room to grow, especially for rural families.
Everett served on the 2015 National Commission on Hunger, which was tasked with utilizing existing programs to address domestic hunger and food insecurity. He, along with other voluntary commission members, traveled across the country for two years to learn from Americans about their struggle with food insecurity.
According to Everett, part of the BCHP commission’s findings was that the remedies for urban communities are not working for rural communities, so a new plan had to be crafted.
Everett said the BCHP contacted the USDA to design a new method to combat rural food insecurity. His team at the BCHP devised a plan to send boxes of meals to children every week to cover two meals per day. The USDA supported their idea and launched a pilot program during the summer of 2019.
“We identified 20 school districts in East and West Texas and signed up 4,000 children to be in the summer demonstration program in 2019,” Everett said. “We ended up providing 500,000 meals and snacks over the 10-week demonstration project.”
The USDA and the BCHP saw the success of the first summer and planned to expand the program to New Mexico and Alaska for the summer of 2020. Everett said government officials from both states reached out to him and the BCHP due to shared interests in ending food insecurity in their states. When COVID-19 struck and closed down every school in the United States, the program scaled more quickly than originally anticipated.
“I was in Washington, D.C., when the secretary and the undersecretary [of the USDA] called me to their headquarters,” Everett said. “They tell me, ‘Schools are about to shut down; is there any way you can scale this program up nationwide?’”
Everett said he and his team took the challenge happily. The BCHP and its partners across the nation ended up serving 40 million meals throughout the summer of 2020.
“Very few others are doing work in rural America to the scale that our team has been working,” Everett said. “That’s not a credit to us; it’s more of a reflection on the state of the union than a positive reflection on us.”
