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Nearly 1.2 million low-income New York State students rely on school lunches to fuel their learning; however, nearly 830,000 New York children lose access to lunch during the summer months, and therefore miss out on the academic and nutritional support they need to thrive. According to the Food Research and Action Center’s 2024 Summer Nutrition Status Report, only 1 in 4 low-income children who rely on free or reduced-price school lunches accessed a summer lunch in New York in 2023. This nutritional gap contributes to summer learning loss, which may disproportionately affect children from low-income households, exacerbating socioeconomic disparities in literacy and math.
The good news is that an increasing number of partners, including libraries, are working together to ensure kids have access to healthy food year-round. As trusted and valued community centers, many libraries find that offering meals and snacks to youth makes good sense for their summer programming, brings in new patrons, and aligns with their mission.
In 2024, over 100 libraries were approved to serve summer meals or snacks through the Summer Food Service Program (SFSP), a federally funded program that enables qualified organizations – including libraries – to serve free meals to kids and teens in low-income areas. This is exciting news as the number of participating libraries had dropped during and after the pandemic, from 133 library meal sites in 2019 to roughly 50 libraries serving as meal sites in the last few years. Many more libraries help promote summer meals through outreach to their patrons and broader community.
A few rural libraries participated in the rural non-congregate flexibility in summer 2024, which allows families to pick-up multiple days worth of meals at one time. This is a distinct departure from the requirements for traditional summer meals, where kids must eat meals on-site. This new, permanent flexibility is intended to better support rural communities, which often face barriers in the form of transportation and time constraints. Kudos to the libraries who implemented this new flexibility in 2024!
The SFSP is administered by the United States Department of Agriculture and the New York State Education Department. Typically, libraries partner with an existing summer meal “sponsor” - often a school - who provides the meals and handles the administrative and fiscal requirements of the program. Libraries typically serve as summer meal “sites” – or in other words, the location where kids and teens eat summer meals.
There are a variety of meaningful ways your library can be part of this essential and underused child nutrition program, including:
Summer EBT is a new federal nutrition program that provides food benefits for eligible children during the summer break from school. As of Summer 2024, families will receive food benefits per eligible child on an EBT card. Summer EBT benefits can be used just like SNAP benefits to buy food at grocery stores, farmers markets, and other SNAP-authorized retailers. These benefits are intended to work in conjunction with summer meals to help ensure children’s access to healthy food while school is out. For more information, please visit the NYS OTDA Summer EBT webpage.
Hunger Solutions New York Webinar: Launching Summer EBT in New York: Plans for Summer 2024 & How You Can Help
For more information about summer meals and other nutrition programs that can benefit your patrons, contact Cody Bloomfield, Summer Nutrition Specialist, at (518) 915-6647 or Cody.Bloomfield@HungerSolutionsNY.org.
Read a blog post about one of the first libraries to offer summer meals in New York State!
Summer Meals Spotlight: Stephentown Memorial Library Keeps Kids Well Read and Well Fed