Photo Credit: Jake Price, Civil Eats
49 percent of DC households with children experienced food insecurity at some point during the last year, and studies have shown that hunger rates spike during the summer when schools are on break. DC Central Kitchen always ramps up our efforts to provide free meals to the tens of thousands of children who rely on our meals during the school year during school breaks, and this summer was no exception. Civil Eats photojournalist Jake Price captured our summer feeding efforts in this remarkable piece, shining a light on our work to combat hunger and poverty.
Over the last two months, we served a record number of 91,400 locally sourced, scratch-cooked free meals to children and families at summer camps, public pools, schools, and community center programs between June 23rd and August 27th in Wards 5, 6, 7, and 8! We also deployed our two mobile meals trucks to set up distribution sites in areas with significant food access gaps. In addition to distributing free meals to neighbors in those communities, our staff provided breakfast, lunch, dinner, and healthy snacks through partnerships with youth-serving organizations, including the Washington Nationals Youth Baseball Academy and four of their YBA Play sites throughout the District.
Supporters of DCCK’s 2023 summer meals project included the DC Department of Parks and Recreation and long-time Washington Wizards star Bradley Beal, among other local foundations and donors. Read more about our summer feeding efforts here.