Summer is often a time when children are most susceptible to hunger—when they aren’t receiving free school meals. Beginning May 1 through October, our Round Up program benefits TABLE and the Orange County Schools, both of which are working to feed children at risk for hunger.
About TABLE
In the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools, 32.1% of preschool and elementary school children are enrolled in the National School Lunch Program.
Our Round Up campaign for TABLE, at our Carrboro and Southern Village stores, provides fresh produce and healthy non-perishable food for TABLE’s summer meal program. For $15, we can provide healthy food to feed a child for the entire weekend. A typical bag consists of 30% fresh produce, such as blueberries, apples, pears, and carrots; and healthy non-perishables, such as breakfast bars, oatmeal, peanut butter, canned tuna, chicken and rice soup, vegetable soup, and oatmeal.
Volunteers deliver the bags of food to summer camps, summer schools, community centers, and neighborhoods.
For the last four summers, the Weaver Street Market community has donated funds to provide healthy food for all of TABLE’s summer backpack meals. With this community support, TABLE has been able to extend its summer program from 7 to 10 weeks, and increase the number of kids from 350 to 525.
About Orange County Schools
For winter and spring breaks this school year, six Orange County Schools each received two pallets of fresh, healthy food to feed a total of 432 kids.
The food bags included fresh produce, such as gala apples, navel oranges, bananas, baby carrots, bulk green beans, bell peppers, sweet potatoes, and raisins.
One of the students told his social worker, “Those hippies at the co-op have the best apples.”
For the first time this year, we included Latta eggs, Homeland Dairy milk, and Cabot cheese and butter. The bags of food also included many of our packaged favorites from our organic Field Day products. School social workers reported that the kids love Field Day peanut butter, but had never seen peanut butter that needed stirring!
Staff, volunteers and parents showed up to sort the food, bag bulk items, and help connect the food with parents.
Thank you, community members, for rounding up! Since 2015, you have donated funds for 15,280 TABLE backpack meals, and since 2017, 374,410 pounds of food for OCS’s kids. One hundred percent of Round Up funds received are used to buy food, at cost from our suppliers.