Summer Meals for Philly Kids

We are experiencing a hunger crisis in Philadelphia. The loss of pandemic relief dollars at a time when food prices remain high has increased the number of families with kids needing food.

While food insecurity is devastating for everyone, it is particularly harmful for children and their families. Food insecurity has been shown to negatively impact a child's physical health and their mental development – it threatens their social capacity, their physical ability, and their overall readiness for school and work. 

In the Philadelphia region children experience food insecurity at a staggering rate of 25.5% compared to the national rate of 13.6%. That's double the national average and it means that 1 in every 4 kids in Philadelphia do not have the food they need to live healthy lives.

This is unacceptable, particularly when we know that food insecurity is preventable.

That's why each summer we work to ensure kids and their families are connected with free meals in their neighborhood. Many families depend on free and reduced meals during the school year to feed their children, and when the school year ends, families are challenged to fill that gap. We work closely with the City of Philadelphia to connect families and their children to free summer meal sites across the Philadelphia region through our online Summer Meals map on our website and our dedicated Summer Meals Hotline. 

This summer a staff member from a library called to ask where the closest summer meals site was. There were many kids at the library that day, and they needed lunch. It turned out that there was a summer meals location right around the corner from them, but it was going to be closing lunch service shortly. So the staff member quickly hung up to get the kids to the summer meals location. Even though the location was right around the corner, the staff didn't know it was there until they called our Hotline. 

This summer our Summer Meals Map was used over 4,200 times.  We helped twice as many callers to our Summer Meals Hotline compared to the summer of 2022 by connecting over 113 kids to summer meals sites in their neighborhood.

Your support helps us feed kids during the summer as we work to address the staggering and unacceptable level of food insecurity for kids in Philadelphia.