Mobile food routes provide meals and snacks to hundreds of Ohio children during summer months

Jodi Hess drove her Head Start van through the Upper Valley Medical Center parking lot in Troy on Tuesday and received 18 food boxes to give to the three families she works with. 

“This is extra support for kids for the summer. … A lot of kids skip meals because there’s not enough at home, so this is definitely a blessing for people,” said Hess, who is a home-based educator for Head Start, meaning she teaches in people’s homes.

The Troy location is one of two weekly mobile routes Children’s Hunger Alliance has this summer that distributes ready-to-eat meals for families to take home in the summer.

The meals include five days worth of breakfasts, milk, and snacks. All the food is shelf stable, meaning it does not need to be refrigerated. The other mobile route is in Sabina (Clinton County) on Thursdays. 

“The families are used to just providing dinner and weekend food during school time and then summer is a whole different bear,” Hess said. 

More than 450,000 Ohio children struggle with hunger and the summer months can often be the hungriest stretch of the year for students who rely on free or reduced school meals.

The alliance has more than 200 summer meal sites statewide that provides food for children that are sponsored through the USDA’s Summer Food Service Program. 

“In the summer, there’s nothing there to replace it, and so that’s part of what (the alliance) is trying to do is just help ease the burden a little bit and make sure the kids get food in their bellies, and try to help as much as possible,” said Diane Miller Ryan, Children’s Hunger Alliance director of community outreach. 

Slightly more than a quarter (27.2%) of Ohio students participated in the school breakfast program and 54.5% of students participated in the school lunch program during the 2023-24 school year, according to the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce.

The alliance has two vans at the Troy site filled with about 300 boxes of milk, fruit juice, various graham crackers, and an assortment of cereals. Each child receives a box. 

The Troy site typically gives away about 250 boxes each week and Sabina averages distributing about 70 boxes each week, Ryan said.

“I pick up two boxes for my grandkids,” Amy Thompson, of Covington, said. “They really enjoy the snacks that are in there.”

This was Ashley Elliott’s second time picking up food boxes. 

“I really don’t know what I would do to feed the kids,” she said. “It helps a lot.” 

Paula Smith has been picking up food boxes in the summer for the past few years for her five grandchildren. 

“I do it because I know it helps them,” she said after the boxes were loaded into her car on Tuesday. “Most of them are used to having meals at school so this helps my grandson and granddaughter and their parents save a little bit of money.” 

A lot of families say the grab-and-go meals help take the burden off of their grocery bills, Ryan said. 

“It helps the parents a lot of times just stretch their grocery dollars more than it normally would if they didn’t have it,” she said. “Kids can be bottomless pits, especially in the summertime.”

The grocery budget is often one of the first things to get trimmed, Ryan said. 

“You can’t cut your rent, you can’t cut your electricity, you can’t cut your power,” she said. “So what’s the one thing that’s kind of expendable? It’s your food budget. So that’s usually where it gets knocked off the most.”

The alliance’s funding was cut by $2 million in Ohio’s two-year operating budget that was recently signed into law — meaning the alliance will provide 1.2 million fewer meals for children when they go back to school next month, said Children’s Hunger Alliance President and CEO Michelle M. Brown.

“Despite the state budget cut, we do not plan to cut any children from our programs,” Brown said in an email. “To make the numbers work, we will have to provide less food over fewer weeks during the year.”

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