RELEASE: No Kid Hungry Announces Six National "Innovation Acceleration" Award Recipients

Contact: Johanna Elsemore at 202.478.6554 or jelsemore@strength.org

Washington, D.C. - The national anti-hunger campaign No Kid Hungry today announced six national Innovation Acceleration Award recipients, organizations and entrepreneurs who are making No Kid Hungry a reality through innovative practices and programs. Each will receive $1,000 to support its work to end childhood hunger.

The award announcement accompanies the release of No Kid Hungry’s Hunger Innovation Report, which examines attitudes toward innovation and documents bold ideas from across the country that are working to connect more kids with healthy meals.

Through a national survey, No Kid Hungry uncovered innovation working across all nutrition  programs – from school breakfast to summer meals, SNAP, WIC, food pantries and nutrition education. By employing human-centered design, tapping into technology and adopting mainstream models from other sectors, these leaders and entrepreneurs are scaling successful programs and finding ways to reach kids and families where they are. 

The following are the recipients of No Kid Hungry’s Innovation Acceleration Award for 2019:

• A Rural Grocery Store - With No Workers in New Prague, Minnesota: Founded by Kendra Rasmusson and her husband Paul, Farmhouse Market is a 650-square-foot grocery store partnering with local farmers, food producers and natural food distributors to stock quality, organic and local items, using technology to cut out the biggest cost: employees. “For us, there was one grocery store on the outer part of the town, but there was really nothing in the downtown heart of the area,” says Rasmusson. “We originally set out to have a standard staffed grocery store but when we started plugging in the numbers, the number of hours needed to staff the place never added up. Instead of quitting the mission, we had to pivot and think about technology.”
• A Drive-through Food Pantry in Fargo, North Dakota: After members of the community cited distance, weather, difficulty lifting boxes and concern about stigma as barriers, Great Plains Food Bank shifted their mobile pantry to a drive-through model. “People were driving over 80 miles to come and get a little food box,” says Melissa Sobolik, who directed the project. “Before that, they had nothing … That's the best possible solution - the community sees it as an issue, steps up and addresses it head-on.”
• SNAP in Schools in Tulsa, Oklahoma: Hunger Free Oklahoma was struck by the low number of families using SNAP benefits in their state. Instead of working within the existing constraints, they came up with a way to break barriers down and meet families on their turf: by introducing the SNAP in Schools program, where school administrators are trained to help caregivers enroll in SNAP onsite in schools. “In some rural schools, enrolling 15 families in SNAP could mean the difference between the school being able to serve meals for free to all students or having to charge,” says Treba Shyers, the project lead for SNAP in Schools. “It is great to be able to help students and schools succeed.”
• The Travelin’ Table in Philipsburg, Pennsylvania: Noticing that hunger wasn’t the only problem needing to be solved in his community, Moshannon Valley YMCA branch director Mel Curtis partnered with Penn State Health Medical Group to turn their mobile meals program into a “Travelin’ Table” bus: delivering meals, backpacks, medical help and dental care. “It’s really multifaceted,” says Curtis. “It’s like a free clinic for these kids.”
• A Pop-up Summer Meals Restaurant in Emporia, Kansas: Social Innovation Lab seeks to break away from the “Mom’s Kitchen” mindset of, “You get what you get, or you don't eat.” Instead, this summer meal site functions more like a Chipotle, offering delicious and healthy food, cooked and prepared exactly the way its customers - hungry kids and adults - want it. “Here, you can come and order your food customized whatever way you want,” says Matthew Shephard, who founded the program. “That really makes it more attractive to the youth and everybody else to get what they actually want to eat instead of just what's being offered.”
• Friendly Neighborhood Summer Meals Sites in Nacogdoches, Texas: When the local summer meals site was no longer a safe place to serve much-needed meals, Nacogdoches community members came together and volunteered their own yards as summer meals sites, allowing staff from the school district to utilize them as a location to serve meals to kids in the neighborhood. 

“We’ve learned so much  from these exceptional leaders,” said Kirsten Craft, No Kid Hungry’s senior manager for program innovation. “What this project taught us is that successful models exist all around the country that can be built on and adapted to meet the needs of every community.”  

In America today, 1 in 7 kids is living in a family that struggles with hunger – but it doesn’t have to be this way. No Kid Hungry is ending childhood hunger by identifying barriers that prevent kids from consistently getting the food they need and finding ways to eliminate them.