An urgent truth exists in America: children living in rural communities face a particular vulnerability to food insecurity and hunger. Rural child hunger is deeply intertwined with other social determinants, including financial insecurity, racial inequity and inadequate healthcare and transportation infrastructure. However, just as the challenges facing rural communities are interconnected, so are the solutions.
Research on Rural Child Hunger and Food Insecurity:
Federal Programs: The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) provides funding for a range of nutrition assistance programs to help children and families access the resources we all need to thrive. No Kid Hungry’s Center for Best Practices supports program excellence through webinars, case studies, toolkits and other resources geared toward local program providers and state agencies.
Meal Program Promotion:
Rural Communities Leading The Way: Spreading The Word Through Creative Communications
Meal service programs supporting rural communities must be creative about program promotion as they often cover large geographic areas with limited transportation and a lack of broadband infrastructure. These rural programs utilize multiple promotion strategies to be sure every community member is aware of meal service dates and times. The specific combination of promotion strategies implemented will depend on your community's preferred forms of communication.
Explore the creative communication strategies from No Kid Hungry's Promising Practices to End Rural Child Hunger grantee, Kern County Libraries from Kern County, California.
Over the course of the past decade, No Kid Hungry’s work to end child hunger has shown that not all communities are alike, and that interventions to address hunger must incorporate local perspectives and realities in order to solve urgent challenges faced by families. For families with low income living in rural areas, the geography of hunger often includes food deserts without access to full-service supermarkets; higher prices for food that is available; and high transportation costs associated with limited infrastructure. The good news is that programmatic and policy options exist that would make a meaningful difference in the lives of children and families at risk of hunger, some of which would also provide a meaningful economic boost to rural communities across America.
Program Delivery: Rural places are often close-knit and possess a strong sense of community, which can be a unique asset in addressing hunger. Here, we highlight strategies and tactics refined and implemented at the community level.
Mobile Meals: are one solution to reaching kids who are missing out on meals during the summertime when school is out of session. Using the “mobile meals” model, sponsors use vehicles to transport and serve meals directly at apartment complexes, parks, and other locations where children spend their summer days. Mobile programs provide a hyper-local food delivery model that may be particularly useful in rural or suburban communities where distance and a lack of public transportation options are major barriers to access. As part of No Kid Hungry’s Mobile Meals Toolkit, we’ve documented three unique mobile meals models that were thoughtfully designed to meet the needs of children and families. Each one highlights a different rural community and will give you new ideas and help you to think strategically about designing a successful mobile meals program.
Produce Rx: Produce prescription interventions have been popular as a means for addressing nutrition insecurity. Unfortunately, most of these interventions have been piloted in urban areas, thus the collective learning captured in resources meant to help communities adopt and scale these practices largely leave out key considerations that make the application of such models useful in rural areas.
Rural Produce Prescription Toolkit: This toolkit is intended to be a practical, user-friendly guide for those planning and operating produce prescription programs in rural areas. It provides an important framework and steps to consider if you’re thinking of establishing a produce prescription program in your community. Additionally, current produce prescription program implementers will find key considerations for program scaling and sustainability. Topics covered in this toolkit include:
Cumberland PATH: A Pilot Program to Increase Fruit & Vegetable Access in Rural Virginia
This case study of the Cumberland PATH fruit and vegetable benefit program highlights lessons learned and opportunities for organizations and other leaders interested in increasing access to fruits and vegetables in their communities. It provides an in-depth look at a Produce Prescription-style program, operating in a rural community without a robust healthcare infrastructure. The program partnered with community-based organizations and leveraged existing assets to increase access to fruits and vegetables for children and adults in the community.
Over the course of the past decade, No Kid Hungry’s work to end child hunger has shown that not all communities are alike and that interventions to address hunger must incorporate local perspectives and realities in order to solve urgent challenges faced by families. For families with low income living in rural areas, the geography of hunger often includes food deserts without access to full-service supermarkets; higher prices for food that is available; and high transportation costs associated with limited infrastructure. The good news is that opportunities for policy change exist that would make a meaningful difference in the lives of children and families at risk of hunger, while also providing a meaningful economic boost to rural communities across America.
Policy Change: State and federal lawmakers have the power to implement policy solutions to alleviate child hunger in rural and hard-to-reach communities. By supporting nutrition access for children in rural communities, we can ensure that kids have the support they need to grow up strong, laying the groundwork for future prosperity.
Federal: At the federal level, through Child Nutrition Reauthorization, Congress also has the opportunity to make significant updates and improvements to our nation’s federal nutrition programs. These go beyond the emergency measures we've seen during the Covid-19 response, but reflect some of the lessons learned during this crisis. Three key changes would especially benefit rural communities.
Streamline the afterschool and summer meal programs into a single program. Currently, afterschool meals and summer meals operate as two programs with two sets of rules and regulations, two sets of audits and two sets of staff training. The paperwork, red tape and amount of time spent on doubling this work can act as a deterrent for organizations to act as summer meal sites. Allowing these two programs to operate under one set of rules and regulations would reduce administrative burdens, foster greater efficiency and enable providers to reach more children and families with programming.
Introduce flexibility around the “congregate” meal requirement. Many communities need more tools beyond congregate meals to ensure that children have adequate and dignified access to summer meals. The congregate meal requirement, which requires that children go to and from summer meal sites each day in order to consume a meal onsite during a specific timeframe, is a limiting factor of a program that only serves about 15-17% of eligible children. Providing flexibility around this regulation would allow providers to drop meals off with eligible families or operate mobile food trucks where kids could pick up a meal and take it home. This innovation will allow the program to better reach eligible communities in rural and other hard-to-reach areas, as we've seen throughout the Covid-19 response thanks to federal waivers allowing for non-congregate meal service and parent pickup of meals.
Permanently authorize the Summer Electronic Benefit Transfer (Summer EBT). In many communities, the most effective, direct way to reach kids is to provide additional funds for food purchase through an electronic benefit transfer system. The USDA conducted a demonstration project in several states in 2011 and 2012 and found this was an effective tool to reach children, especially in rural communities, and actively reduced very low food security for children by 33%. In many ways, success with Summer EBT laid the groundwork for Pandemic EBT, an ongoing emergency response of the USDA during Covid-19 that provides food assistance to families with children eligible for free or reduced-price meals.
State: While federal Child Nutrition Programs are regulated at the national level, states have significant leeway in how these programs are administered and can provide supplemental funding and other resources to ensure school and out-of-school time meals effectively reach eligible children, as seen in the examples below.
Require alternative breakfast models in high-need schools. Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Nevada, Washington, and Oregon are examples of states that have adopted a requirement that schools provide breakfast after the start of the school day when school enrollment consists of 70% or greater free and reduced price lunch eligible students. Another example can be found in California, which included $500,000 in a recent state budget to support schools looking to implement breakfast after the bell.
Take advantage of opportunities to bolster the quality and reach of federal nutrition programs. In Kentucky, the Kentucky Departments of Agriculture and Education, in partnership with Feeding Kentucky, the state association of food banks, established the Kentucky-Grown Fruit and Vegetable Incentive Program, also known as K-VIP. This program was established in 2018 to increase locally-grown fruit and vegetables in the Summer Food Service Program (SFSP) and the CACFP At-Risk Afterschool Meals Program. Through K-VIP, Feeding Kentucky covers half the cost of produce purchased directly from Kentucky farms, helping provide an economic boost to local food supply chains.
Provide additional grocery assistance to families in rural communities when schools are closed. The summer meals program, which requires families to travel to a meal site and consume the meal at the site, can be challenging to access for children, especially in rural communities. Mirroring the successful federal Summer EBT demonstration project, states can support children in these communities when schools are closed by providing financial assistance directly to rural families to purchase groceries. Maryland, for example, established the Summer SNAP for Children program, which provides an additional $30 per summer month and an additional $10 in December for each child in households already receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.
The COVID-19 pandemic created many significant challenges in terms of access to food assistance resources in rural communities. Nationwide waivers implemented in response to the pandemic have helped many rural communities overcome these barriers and serve more meals. The non-congregate, meal service time, and parent or guardian meal pick-up waivers facilitated innovative service models like home delivery and weekly meal bundles. Data analysis from No Kid Hungry shows just how much these waivers meant for rural communities.
How Rural Communities Overcame Challenges During the COVID-19 Pandemic
No Kid Hungry partnered with Save the Children to conduct four, 1.5 hour long focus groups with sixteen No Kid Hungry grantees that self-identified as serving exclusively rural communities. Grantees represented both school districts and community based organizations. Grantees overcame many challenges ranging from food shortages to staffing burnout, language barriers, and limited transportation access. Through their creative problem solving, three trends emerged.
The need is great. Grantees saw the need for meals grow during the COVID-19 pandemic and expect it to continue as the effects of the pandemic are felt for years to come. Continuation and expansion of summer meals programs are a high priority for rural communities.
Flexibility is necessary. All grantees expressed they would like at least some of the waivers to stay in place, especially the area eligibility waiver, in order to break down the barriers that lead to food insecurity.
No Kid Hungry is working to bring together national, state, and local leaders and experts from around the country to explore disparities driving child hunger in rural communities and identify promising practices and policy levers to alleviate rural child hunger. We celebrated innovations that are user-centered and evidence-informed and fostered connections between communities of research and practice. Through these convenings, we have helped to cultivate a thriving dialogue among researchers, policymakers, and practitioners who are working to end child hunger in the rural communities they live in or serve. Much of these efforts have centered on two national convenings, which have produced a wide range of content that is available below for review.
2022 Rural Child Hunger Summit: On April 27-28, No Kid Hungry partnered with Save the Children to host No Kid Hungry's fourth annual Summit. 2022's Summit theme was Reboot, Reconnect, Redesign: Creating Equitable Solutions for Rural Children. During the two-day event, speakers from all different backgrounds spotlighted their programs and how they can be replicated to overcome common rural-specific challenges.
2021 Rural Child Hunger Summit: On March 23-24, No Kid Hungry hosted our third annual Summit as a virtual event over Zoom. Over the course of two days, key themes explored included collaborative planning, implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on Child Nutrition policy and practice, and inequity in food systems, among many others.
Click the link above to access session materials and recordings from this year's Summit.
No Kid Hungry blog: 4 Takeaways from the 2021 Rural Child Hunger Summit.
2020 Rural Child Hunger Summit: The Summit, which took place on March 31, was originally scheduled to occur as a physical convening in Columbus, OH but was moved to a virtual platform due to the Covid-19 outbreak.
2019 Rural Child Hunger Summit: On March 21-22, No Kid Hungry hosted its first-ever Rural Child Summit in Louisville, Kentucky. Over the course of two days, the group focused on the latest research, policy options, and emerging innovations designed to uncover promising practices in the fight against rural child hunger.
Access all Summit presentations by clicking on the session titles in this hyperlinked program.
Through the ‘Promising Practices to End Rural Child Hunger’ initiative, Share Our Strength provided grant funding to support the work of community-based organizations. In doing so, this initiative seeks to identify, document, and better understand promising practices within rural communities that achieve one or more of the following outcomes:
Increase food security among rural children
Increase participation in one or more of the federal Child Nutrition Programs
Decrease stigma associated with accessing federal Child Nutrition Programs and/or additional food assistance resources
Promoting and supporting enrollment of SNAP, WIC, and/or Pandemic - EBT programs as well as the Child Tax Credit.
Broad-based community engagement to understand and address community needs related to child food security, as well as sustained partnerships to sustain meaningful interventions over time.
2022 cohort members include:
2021 cohort members included:
View recordings for webinars on rural child hunger best practices through the resources attached below.
