Food bank in Northeast Tennessee delivers summer lunches to rural, low-income children

Nearly 500 low-income children in Northeast Tennessee won't go hungry this summer. Second Harvest Food Bank's Lunch Express program, which was launched last year through a $50,000 grant from the ConAgra Foods Foundation, provides sack lunches five days a week from June 1 to Aug. 2 to children in Washington, Sullivan, Carter, Unicoi and Greene counties, Sue Guinn Legg reports for the Johnson City Press.

The program received another $20,000 this year, Legg reports. Funds were used to purchase four retired school buses, pay drivers, and cover the cost of fuel "to make daily lunch deliveries to 11 congregate feeding sites and 29 neighborhoods . . . where children do not have close access to other feeding programs."

Rhonda Chafin, executive director of the regional food bank, told Legg, “We’re the only food bank that’s doing this. And we’re one of the first to operate a program like this. . . . We’re serving 475 to 500 children a day. We focus on a lot of trailer courts and rural areas where kids can’t walk into a town where there are places they can eat.”

Eli Saslow of The WashingtonPost wrote it up like this: "It was the first day of summer in a place where summers had become hazardous to a child’s health, so the school bus rolled out of the parking lot on its newest emergency route. It passed by the church steeples of downtown and curved into the blue hills of Appalachia. The highway became two lanes. The two lanes turned to red dirt and gravel. On the dashboard of the bus, the driver had posted an aphorism. “Hunger is hidden,” it read, and this bus had been dispatched to find it." It's a great read, and a lesson in how to write about poverty; for more, click here.

AmeriCorps VISTA volunteers ride along with the drivers, make contact with the children’s families, and provide educational nutrition information. Children receive a different sandwich each day, along with fresh vegetables or fruit, and milk, and once a week get a prepackaged lunch of meat and cheese and crackers, Legg reports.