It’s no secret that hunger is on the rise in DC, and that summer can be an especially difficult time for food insecure children. Thanks to the support of our community and dozens of dedicated front-line partners across the District, DC Central Kitchen faced the challenge of summertime child hunger head-on—and responded with a record-breaking summer meals campaign.
This summer, we served an unprecedented total of 157,446 free summer meals to DC children across 70 service sites. This tally exceeded last year’s 126,000 meals by 24%. We served more than double the number of meals this year that we served in 2023, which at the time was, by far, an all-time record of its own, as we had just moved into our long-awaited headquarters in Southwest DC.
Cooking, packaging, delivering, and serving that many meals is a massive effort, but this project took more than meals alone. We worked closely with a growing number of public, private, and charter school partners to maintain feeding sites at schools across the District, promote summer meal locations with signage and community outreach, and helped dozens of peer nonprofits navigate the complex public reimbursement process for offsetting a portion of these summer meal expenses. Our growth in scale has been continually matched by our trademark quality, as this was our first summer since winning a national US Department of Agriculture award for our “Gold Level” approach to bringing appetizing, nutritious summer meals to kids!
What does it take to serve record numbers of children and partner locations? Samantha Reilly, MS, RDN, LD, our Director of Contract Meals and Nutrition, says the answer is simple: “It took hard work and dedication from everyone involved to push summer meals forward no matter what.”
Thank you for being a dedicated partner of DC Central Kitchen, so we can take on the growing needs of our city—no matter what.