The signature yellow and black school bus often leads to a seat in a classroom. But for many children in northeast Tennessee, it may lead to their next meal.
The Lunch Express, created last year by the Second Harvest Food Bank of Northeast Tennessee, travels an upward of 50 miles a day, seven days a week, to deliver sack lunches to food insecure children throughout Greene County, Tenn.
The food bank cooked up the idea after realizing the challenge of feeding children during summer vacation, when no school and limited transportation means students lose access to the free and reduced-price lunch program.
As anti-hunger group Feeding America recently reported, 49 million Americans have suffered from food insecurity since 2008, which includes 16 million children. In this part of the state, about two out of five students are uncertain of where their next meal is coming from, CBS reports.
Which is why this Tennessee food bank decided to take their efforts on the road. Last summer the organization purchased four used school buses for $4,000 each to serve as bread trucks to reach low-income kids in some of state’s most poverty-stricken areas. Since 2007, the food bank has seen a rise in demand for food assistance by 56 percent, according to CBS.
That number underscores a larger hunger crisis across the country. American food insecurity is at a record high, MSNBC reports. The growing hunger is heightened by a $5 billion automatic federal cut in food stamps in 2013 and the 2014 farm bill, which reduced $8.7 billion in food stamp benefits over the next decade.
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As we head into the summer, the food bank braces for another season of hungry kids in hard-to-reach places.
The four buses wind will again wind through surrounding areas of Greenville, Tenn., spending about 15 minutes in each stop, which tend to be trailer parks. Kids pile into the bus, where they must finish their meal before they exit.
Each lunch contains about 750 calories worth of federal government-sanctioned, healthy food. The meals can range from celery, canned oranges and a bologna sandwich to cheese, cracker and meat snack packs. The lunch, which costs about $3.47 in total, is funded by taxpayers. For some children, as the Washington Post reports, this is the only reliable meal of the day.
But the biggest challenge volunteers face is complying with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) rules, according to the Post. Those restrictions prohibit giving out second servings, extra snacks and lunch to anyone over the age of 18 unless they’re disabled.
“You learn that there are rules,” food bank employee Morgan Anderson told the Post last July. “And then there’s the reality of the people you see on the bus.”
For images of children who benefit from The Lunch Express as well as powerful images of other Americans reliant on food assistance, check out the Post’s moving series, “Hunger in America.“
Category: Moving America Forward
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In 2011 Ben Simon launched The Food Recovery Network at the University of Maryland. The goal was simple: intercept as much leftover food from his college campus’s cafeteria as possible and get it to those in need. Within months, the network grew to include dozens of chapters at colleges across the country. More than 320,000 pounds of recovered food later, Simon is launching his most ambitious initiative to date — Food Recovery Certified.
Any food provider in the country can apply to be Food Recovery Certified as long as they donate their leftovers at least once a month. Cara Mayo, Food Recovery Certified’s program manager, works with local nonprofits to verify the donations. She says she hopes becoming certified will become a national trend. “Consumers want there businesses to be associated with an environmental or social cause. They want the effects of it to be felt in their home and in their community.”
Editors’ note: Since the original publication of this story, Ben Simon, founder of The Food Recovery Network, has become a NationSwell Council member.
Meet the Surprising Group of People Making Life Easier in the Kitchen for People With Disabilities
There are 54 million Americans living with a disability in this very moment. That number constitutes the country’s largest minority, and yet there seems to be little consideration for their needs in the kitchen.
Which is exactly why a group of student volunteers from Montana’s Highlands College in Butte are doing their part to service this need by building a brand new, American Disabilities Act-compliant kitchen from the ground-up. As the Montana Standard reports, these students teamed up with the Silver Bow Developmental Disabilities Council (an organization that provides services to disabled community members) to transform a unused and worn-down handball court into a gleaming “dream kitchen” for people with disabilities, providing easy and safe access to sinks, cabinets, counter tops and appliance.
After two years of building a kitchen from scratch, the project, called the Nutrition Education Station, is nearing completion. The aim of the Nutrition Education Station is to build a “teaching style kitchen for people with disabilities,” the Standard writes. Once finished, the space will be open to any organization that serves the disabled, allowing instructors to teach nutrition and cooking classes.
Bill Ryan, Chair of the Trades & Technical Department at Highlands College, told Montana Tech there is a growing need for spaces like this in the community.
“The number of people who are disabled and aging who choose to be self-sufficient and stay in their own homes is growing,” Ryan said. “This project was excellent for our students as they not only got to learn about the technical requirements for making a kitchen accessible to the disabled, they also got to work on a project which will directly help their own community.”
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These Programs for the Poor Preserve Dignity and Demand Accountability — and They’re Working
Programs to help the poor are often top-down initiatives, created and implemented by more fortunate people. But there’s a movement building across the country to empower the low-income people these programs benefit by letting them choose the specific help they need, welcoming their feedback about the effectiveness of the programs that serve them, and holding them accountable for improving their lives.
2012 MacArthur Fellow Maurice Lim Miller founded Family Independence Initiative in 2001 to study how best to help low-income families break out of poverty. FII’s “Opportunity Platform” issued San Francisco families laptops, instructed them to set goals for themselves, and invited them to track their own progress, which resulted in a 23% increase in income and a 24% increase in savings. Now Lim Miller is developing a computer platform through which low-income families can rate and offer feedback about programs and services they’ve used, like Yelp for social services.
Low-income people are rarely asked for their input on how services are working, as they are seen as recipients rather than consumers. But Lim Miller thinks using techniques from political polling and marketing studies can make services helping poor people more efficient and effective so they ultimately lift people out of poverty. The feedback users provide will help nonprofits and government programs determine how to improve, and allow foundations decide which programs are best to fund.
Erika Flint, who grew up poor as the daughter of a single mother, is another reformer whose work at Watertown Urban Mission in New York goes along with this dignity-driven approach to helping the poor. It’s run by a consortium of churches, who pool resources to help the poor with a variety of needs. They don’t give out checks or food vouchers—instead representatives from Watertown Urban Mission meet with families individually and give them the specific things they need to solve their problems—such as diapers or counseling, while setting up a plan to achieve self-sufficiency. For example, the Mission buys used cars and sells them to low-income parents at a steep discount, for $600, payble in monthly installments of $50. “We could just give the cars away,” Flint told Nicole Caldwell of Truth Atlas. “But instead, we enable people to buy their own.”
Flint said the idea behind everything the Mission does is to support people as they help themselves, “in order to maintain a sense of pride.” And with pride intact, the people they serve just might lift themselves out of poverty.
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Music and Mentorship: How an Austin Org Is Helping Foster Kids Survive the System
Working as a prosecutor in the juvenile justice system can be a daily lesson in despair, so when Karyn Scott left her job as a felony prosecutor in Austin, Texas, in 2000 she wanted to find some way to work with troubled youth, especially children in foster care. She had grown discouraged watching a parade of foster kids get shuffled through a burdened system, failing to receive the added help many needed to overcome upheaval, neglect and sometimes abuse.
The courts just don’t have the resources to keep up. There are some 400,000 kids in foster care in the United States and about 30,000 in Texas, according to federal and state agencies. About 59 percent eventually are reunited with a parent, legal caretaker or a family member, and only 22 percent are legally adopted, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The rest are left under court supervision or transferred to a variety of agencies, including, unfortunately for a few, juvenile correctional facilities. Some 10 percent are emancipated, given adult status, by the courts and 1 percent run away. During their time in foster care, most children live in family homes, while a small minority are placed in group homes. Many kids bounce in and out of the system.
Scott wanted to find a way to keep children from becoming unmoored as they traveled through the foster care system, a tempestuous journey that can be dispiriting and difficult. She also wanted to offer the courts more resources to address each kid’s particular needs. “They need a consistent friend in their life,” Scott says, especially since their lives are marked by so much volatility — they’re moved often from one care setting to another, disrupting their home and school routines.
Scott’s mission was to create a program that would help encourage bonds with a child or teenager that would last. In 2009, after exploring various programs targeting foster kids, she came up with the idea of using music to ease that connection. Austin, which touts itself in true Texas style as the “live music capital of the world,” seemed like the perfect spot to launch her new initiative: Kids in a New Groove (KING). In its early days, the program, which pairs music teacher-mentors with foster kids in one-on-one relationships, “grew organically,” says Scott, as word spread quickly among Austin’s abundance of music teachers. To date, hundreds of kids have graduated from KING, with 80 children in the program at any one time.
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KING uses both volunteer and paid teachers — the latter are those who have served with the program over the long haul. One veteran is Missy Hance, who studied music education at West Virginia University, before moving to Austin to teach music to both public- and private-school kids. She’s been teaching and mentoring KING students for more than four years. Working with foster care children requires her to be “more sensitive to their needs,” Hance says, since many of them are “down on themselves and do give up a lot easier.” It’s taught Hance a lot of patience, and led her to explore new methods of instruction and communication to better reach foster kids, many of whom may have been neglected or abused. She says music allows her students “to express emotions that they are not always able to express in words. It gives them a voice.”
The program uses a reward system that offers both stability and motivation. Each student earns stickers as they reach a series of curriculum goals set by their teacher. Achievements are continually reinforced: Five stickers earn a small reward, perhaps a T-shirt. Then, as students progress, the rewards grow larger, and if they complete the program, the ultimate reward — they get their own instrument. “I always push myself and try to get the child to get better,” says Hance. “Foster kids or not, theyʼre kids and they are just like any other kids.”
But the programʼs true success stems from its core element, says Scott — mentoring. KING emphasizes developing each teacherʼs mentoring skills and the cementing of a steady, personal connection between teacher and student. Over time, the kids learn to trust an adult, even though so many grown-ups have failed them in other areas of their lives. That “consistent friend in their life,” as Scott characterizes it, never deserts them, not when the child is adopted, moves on or comes of age and graduates from the program. One student, Anthony (his last name is withheld for privacy), learned to play the guitar during his stay in a group home. He was so enthusiastic that he began teaching his roommates how to play. Eventually Anthony, now 14, was placed in a rural home outside of Austin, but he continued to get lessons from his teacher via Skype.
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The act of learning an instrument may confer immeasurable benefits too. Research has shown that studying music can rewire the brain in ways that may affect the processing of emotion and self-awareness, which is “why this program works for kids who have been abused,” Scott says. A 2012 study by the National Endowment for the Arts showed socially and economically disadvantaged children and teenagers exposed to the arts did better both in academic and social development. Studies by the Society for Neuroscience released in 2013 also found that music education helped boost neural pathways in the parts of the brain associated with creativity and decision-making.
One of the programʼs notable graduates is Joshua Moore, a member of the Austin alternative pop band Scarecrow Birdy, which plays in the city’s clubs and, thanks to KING underwriting, recently recorded its first EP. As a child, Moore was in and out of foster care, living in various temporary homes and a shelter while his parents grappled with drug addiction and prison. Moore, a guitar player and songwriter, credits KING for helping him survive his childhood, and has performed at the program’s fundraisers to give back. “Music is not so much expression of life as it is and life as it should be. It’s life as you want it to be,” he told the newspaper Austin American-Statesman in 2012.
Austin’s music community has come out to support KINGʼs efforts wholeheartedly. The organization relies on donations — it holds an annual major fundraiser — to pay for kids’ lessons. A yearʼs worth of instruction for each KING student costs about $1,000. This yearʼs Music for the Soul fundraiser, which will take place on May 1, will headline Martie Maguire and Emily Robison, the founding members of the Dixie Chicks, who now perform as the Court Yard Hounds.
Further down the line, Scott is planning to expand KING’s mentoring-teaching model beyond its current geographic limits — for now, KING works primarily with children in Austin, and also with some in Houston and Dallas. But wherever KING’s future students may come from, Scott has the same aspiration for all of them: using long-term loving relationships to teach them skills like goal setting, accountability and perseverance that will help them navigate the foster care system and life thereafter.
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Once the Target of Bullies, This Teen With Tourettes Is Making Sure No Other Kid Suffers
Jaylen Arnold knows exactly what it’s like to be attacked for being a little different. The Lakeland, Florida boy was born with Tourette’s Syndrome, a neurological disorder that causes him to involuntarily tic and make sounds. He also has Aspergers Syndrome and severe Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
Unfortunately, his differences made him a target of bullies. As Yahoo! Shine reports, the teasing got so bad he had to be taken out of school. But instead of suffering silently, when he was only 8-years-old, Jaylen decided that he had nothing to be ashamed of and that the bullies would never get to him. He also wanted to make sure no other kid—especially ones with disabilities—would go through what he did.
With the help from his friends and family, Jaylen launched his own charity, the Jaylen’s Challenge Foundation, to put an end to bullying through education and urging tolerance.
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“Once kids are educated about it, they won’t bully so much,” Jaylen writes on his website. “I put it to the test with the class at the school I attended here for a few months. It was a huge success! You should have seen all the kids coming up to me that use to make fun and copy me. They were actually telling me they were sorry!”
Now 13, Jaylen makes appearances at schools across the country to help banish bullying. According to Yahoo!, the seventh-grader has spoken to more than 60,000 kids, in the hopes that his message will create a domino effect of change.
“I’m trying to make the world a better place in any way that I can, because if I can help one person, then that person can help someone else, and then that person can help someone else,” Jaylen said. “We all come together to end bullying.”
Jaylen’s mission to stamp out bullying has already received national attention. As you can see in the video below, he recently received a $10,000 check from talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres to help him in his cause.
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How an Everyday Customer Gave This Waitress the Tip of Her Life
Sometimes it pays to be friendly, and former waitress Melissa Mainier learned that lesson four years ago while serving at the Peachtree Restaurant and Lounge in Harrisburg, Penn.
Mainier, now a nurse at Pinnacle Health’s General Osteopathic Hospital, found a Good Samaritan in her regular customer Benjamin Olewine III while working her way through college. Olewine first struck up a friendship with the then-server in 2010, when he learned Mainier was saddled with student loans and waitressing to get by.
Olewine, a local entrepreneur, decided to give Mainier the tip of lifetime and offer to pay her tuition bills. Mainier declined his offer twice before finally agreeing to let him help. After sending Olewine her tuition bill, he returned to the restaurant the next day with a check in tow.
The now-nurse estimates he’s spent about $30,000 on her education, funding every school expense ranging from tuition to textbooks.
“My dad was so happy for me,” said Mainier, whose father passed away two years ago. “Both my parents were just so happy for me. I’m sure they would want to help me if they could.”
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Mainier is not the first student Olewine has assisted. The local philanthropist contends his family has long been generous in the food and service industry. His father, who owned a grocery store during the Great Depression, often helped struggling customers. The karma must have paid off, leading to a successful business expansion that was handed down to Olewine to run before it was sold to Sysco Foods, where he now serves as Chairman Emeritus.
Olewine has carried his family’s charitable tradition by donating $1 million to the Culinary Arts School at HACC at Central Pennsylvania’s Community College, where Mainier received her associate’s degree in nursing. Last year the PinnacleHealth Spine, Bone & Joint Institute recognized his generosity by naming a wing after him—the same wing where Mainier works.
He continues to support Mainier as she works towards a bachelor’s degree from Drexel University, and encourages the young nurse to continue her education by earning a master’s degree.
It seems Mainier’s big tip is not so much the money as it is the lesson of giving back.
“I’m going to continue to pay it forward,” she told Ellen’s Good News, “for the rest of my life.”
A Formerly Homeless Student’s Remarkable Education Journey
When Ivon Padilla-Rodriguez was a junior at Canyon Springs High School in Nevada, there were times when she didn’t know where she was going to sleep at night.
“For three months, we had to look for somewhere to eat; we had to look for somewhere to sleep,” Ivon told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “My mom would go to Catholic Charities for food.” She also described sleeping on couches and cars of friends and strangers alike.
As the newspaper reports, despite not having a roof over her head, she excelled in school and became the top student in her class, graduating as valedictorian in 2011.
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The now 20-year-old is a double major in history and philosophy at the University of Nevada. And that’s not all she’s achieved in so little time—she’s also just won the highly competitive and prestigious Harry S. Truman Scholarship that’s worth $30,000.
She’s one of 60 students in the country who received this federal scholarship this year. Former notable winners include Janet Napolitano, George Stephanopoulos and Bill de Blasio. The money will go towards an education in law, social work, education, international affairs or public administration, health or policy, the Associated Press writes.
“Ivon’s story of accomplishment and community service is all the more inspiring because of her background,” UNR spokeswoman Jane Tors told the Review-Journal.
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To add icing on the cake, Ivon was also named one of Glamour‘s Top 10 College Women of 2014. Passionate about immigration reform, she told the women’s magazine she hopes to be a Latino-rights lawyer, and eventually a Supreme Court justice like her idol Sonia Sotomayor.
Looks like Ivon’s much-deserved scholarship is just more to add to her ever-increasing education fund. Back in 2011, she also won $100,000 in tuition money from Dr. Pepper after throwing 13 passes into a large Dr. Pepper can.
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This Special-Needs Teen Gave Herself and Her Favorite Charity the Birthday Gift of a Lifetime
Gabi Ury of Boulder, Colorado had it rough from the very beginning.
She was born with VATER Syndrome, a condition that causes a cluster of birth defects in the vertebrae, anus, trachea, esophagus and kidneys. Since birth, Ury has endured 14 surgeries to correct the effects of the syndrome, which left her with missing vertebrae and calf muscles. But her peppy spirit has remained intact despite all the time she’s spent in the hospital, and when she turned 16 on April 17, she wanted to give herself an incredible birthday present by attempting to break the Guinness World Record for the longest-held plank by a female.
Gabi has tried to break records before by constructing the longest hopscotch course and trying to put the most-ever socks on one foot. She fell short both times, but then she figured out she was a plank prodigy during tryouts for the volleyball at the Dawson School in Lafayette. She couldn’t run a mile with the other volleyball hopefuls, so volleyball coach Holly Novak suggested she spend the time performing an equally grueling exercise: planking, in which a person assumes a push-up position and holds it while resting on the forearms. The first time she tried, Gabi held a plank for 12 minutes. “I was astonished the first time she did it,” Novak told Kate Gibson of the Denver Post. “I have to give all the credit to Gabi on this. I have supplied some workouts, but she has really gone after the record.”
Twelve minutes was only the beginning for Gabi. She began practicing holding a plank for 40 minutes or more. “Boredom is a problem and distraction helps a lot,” Gabi told Gibson. She planks while watching ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’ reading a book, and enjoying the company of her dog. She was aiming to break the record for a 40 minute, 1 second plank held by Boise’s Eva Bulzomi, and to raise money for Children’s Hospital Colorado while doing so.
Gabi made her attempt on April 19 at the East Boulder Rec center, and as you can see in this video, she held the plank for an incredible one hour and 20 minutes. Now she just needs to wait for the people at Guinness to verify her accomplishment. In the process, she has raised more than $17,000 for Children’s Hospital. Now that’s what we call a sweet sixteen year old.
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Ask the Experts: The Pay Gap Explained
You’ve probably heard (or read) the most commonly cited stat about the wage gap: On average, women make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns — a ratio that hasn’t shifted since 2002. President Barack Obama wasn’t shy about using this figure (again) in a speech on April 8, otherwise known as National Equal Pay Day (the date marks how far into the following year women must work to earn what men earned in the previous year), when he issued two measures aimed at narrowing the gap among workers contracted by the federal government, noting that “it’s an embarrassment” that women with the same education in the same field earn less than men.
But the 77-cent figure doesn’t paint a complete picture of the wage gap, a fact that has been hashed out countless times in political speeches and the media. It derives from a simple calculation of U.S. Census Bureau data — the difference between women’s median salaries and those of men. It doesn’t take into account other variables that affect wages, like level of education, amount of work experience, or the fact that women are more likely than men to take jobs with lower salaries but more flex time — to better accommodate child-rearing. Depending on how you add it up, the pay gap shrinks (or sometimes grows).
Nevertheless, it doesn’t disappear. Though its actual size may be tricky to pin down, the wage gap is real and signifies a problem that’s much bigger than a single statistic. So, NationSwell convened a panel of experts and asked them to explain the pay gap phenomenon, why it exists and what we can do to fix it. Read on for their thoughts, and then join the conversation by leaving your own ideas in the comments box below.
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