About Schools Serve – the National School Food Drive
Launched in March, 2010, Schools Serve aims to bring together America’s schools and school families around the cause of ending childhood hunger..
Even before the current recession hit, childhood hunger was a reality in all of our communities, even those communities often considered affluent or beyond these concerns. Today, according to our partner Share Our Strength:
49.1 million Americans - including nearly 17 million children - don’t have access to enough healthy food to thrive.
And according to Feeding America:
37 million Americans (nearly 1 in 8 Americans) sought emergency food assistance from local food pantries or food banks or similar service providers in 2009 alone.
We have a hunger epidemic in America; thankfully it’s one that has a cure. We need to get food to those in need and create a movement around ensuring that no child goes hungry in a 21st century America.
With your help we can make a dramatic impact in this fight.
Schools Serve has ambitious goals built around a rather simple premise. We’re enlisting America’s schools to the cause. We’re inspiring America’s school children and school families to make a difference for a lifetime. The good news is that America’s schools – one at a time and in efforts small and large – have already been tackling this issue on their own for years now. Whether through elaborate food drives or simple “donate a canned good, please” requests or through bake sales or volunteer days at the local pantry, we’ve been inspired by the examples already set by schools around the country (see our growing list of these efforts here).
By working together and connecting our efforts to the Schools Serve goal – we all can do more.
Momentum is a powerful thing. One school food drive makes a difference, no doubt. Thousands of connected school food drives is a movement. A dozen volunteers organizing an effort is laudable. Millions of school families and school children is an army. As all results are reported together, we can all see the impact that millions of pounds of food can make for hungry families. Sharing the best practices of the most effective food drives across the country will help all of our efforts. Providing you with the tools and know-how to make your food drive the best it can be will allow you to help feed more hungry children in your community. Together, 10 million pounds of food becomes 20 million pounds of food and then 100 million pounds of food. That’s the vision of Schools Serve.
Perhaps as important as the food we help provide to hungry families is the message we all can send to our school children. The mission of Schools Serve goes beyond just feeding the hungry today and includes educating our school children on the realities of hunger in America and effective efforts for combating this epidemic. By introducing our students to service now, we also hope to inspire our young people to a lifetime of service.
Please join us in serving.
