Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, our team began working with the NC Department of Public Instruction (DPI) to support school districts and other meal providers in the many challenges of safely continuing meal service for NC public school students, especially those who rely on school meals.
Within 24 hours, our team launched a webpage to provide resources for food service organizations on the front lines and to inform families in need where free, healthy meals would be available for teens and children through the federally assisted programs. Among our other actions to support the emergency response while schools were closed, we posted regular updates to a map of meal locations and a county-by-county list of extensive web content from the meal providers, and widely promoted use of a meal locator text service hosted by No Kid Hungry, a campaign of Share Our Strength. See Governor Roy Cooper’s press release about our tools for finding meals for kids during the COVID-19 emergency.
Our other COVID-19 response work includes:
- Connecting more than 1.6 million meals to the homes of children in 20 NC rural districts through the Emergency Meals-to-You program.
- Meals on the Move, a collection of innovative options for meal providers who are adapting to emergency operations.
- Fostering new partnerships through the NC Restaurants Feeding Kids Initiative.
- Collecting information about new suppliers to connect with meal providers.
- Sharing the perspectives of school nutrition professionals through the Voices on the Front Lines project.