They have been providing this service for a long time, but they’ve always had difficultly receiving state funding for the meals. With the state’s program, children are required to meet at congregational sites and eat the meals in front of volunteers. Community Kitchen staff preferred to deliver the meals in what they call “ice cream truck style,” driving from residence to residence to reach as many children as possible.
“Eight or nine years ago we started talking to the state about how we could make what we were doing fit their model closely enough so that we could start to get some of the funds they had reserved for people doing these summer feeding programs,” Vicki Pierce, the director of Community Kitchen, said.
They decided on a compromise in which ?Community Kitchen volunteers could go to a central community location, like a playground, lay down a picnic blanket and encourage the children to eat the meals there. They would keep track of which children took the food home and not ask the state to reimburse them for those meals.
“Last year we kind of hit a snag where all of the sudden the paperwork and all of the years of working with them that we had done weren’t good enough,” Pierce said. “We have a lot of stress about this because our monitors have changed about four times in the last six years, and every year someone has a different opinion about how we should be doing it.”
One time a state representative even told a child that he could not eat the food unless he sat down at the congregational site. Pierce suspects the state is so strict about this condition because of a fear that adults might take the food from the children when they bring it home.
“That seems to me to be something that would happen very, very rarely,” Pierce said. “You’ve got to be a special kind of mean to take food away from hungry kids and eat it as an adult, and I don’t think most people are like that.”
Tired of the arguing and not wanting a hostile relationship with state representatives, Community Kitchen has done things differently this year. At half of their sites, they abide by all of the state regulations and at the other half, they’ve gone back to the old ice cream truck style. They fund these meals with their own with money from spring fundraisers and two small grants.
According to Pierce they are always looking for donations of lunch meat, cereal, granola, peanut butter and six-ounce 100-percent juice boxes.
“We are always going to err on the side of feeding kids,” Pierce said. “If we have to fundraise more to do that, then that’s what we’ll do.”
