Food for the Summer is well into its second year of providing lunches for children in need in the community and according to new program coordinator Emma Jenkins-Sullivan, the program has seen growth in outreach and involvement.

“Last year we had over 650 volunteers come out from the community,” said Jenkins-Sullivan, “and we’re hoping to grow that number even more this summer.

Individuals and local groups alike have reached out to lend a hand to children in need.

“We have many different collaborators: non-profit collaborators and local government collaborators working with us on the program as well.”

Among those collaborators are TABLE, which has provided children with bags of food to take home for the weekends, and Book Harvest, who donated books to the program.

“We also have something called free book Wednesdays so we’ve been lucky enough to be able to get a bunch of books out from Book Harvest,” said Jenkins-Sullivan. “The other day I picked up about a thousand for our first haul for the summer.”

Jenkins-Sullivan says that the enthusiasm among volunteers in the community has been noteworthy.

“There are volunteers that come out daily and there are volunteers that come out even though they might not have a ton of time during the day because they really feel like this is an important issue. Hunger is something that we can fix and something that we can work together to end, especially locally in our community.”

You can find more information about donating or volunteering here.