The U.S. House of Representatives is proposing to eliminate AmeriCorps, the 30-year program that provides the people power that local nonprofit, faith-based, and community organizations train and deploy to respond to our country’s most immediate and critical needs.
If this happens, it will have a devastating effect on the viability and sustainability of FoodCorps’ programming in the communities we partner with across the country.
For over a decade, FoodCorps has proudly partnered with AmeriCorps to address critical needs for food education and access. This year alone, FoodCorps AmeriCorps members reached a record 528,943 students across 13 states and the D.C. Metro area, ensuring access to nutritious food and delivering more than 30,000 hands-on lessons promoting healthy food choices.
Nourishing food is a foundation for every child’s ability to learn and is linked to higher GPAs. School meals have been shown to improve students’ school attendance rates, math and reading scores, behavior, and academic achievement. And child nutrition programs can reduce food insecurity, alleviate poverty, support economic stability, improve health and well-being, protect against diet-related diseases, and boost development. Children are more likely to eat the nutritious foods on their plate if they’ve tasted them before, which is where food education plays a vital role. By pairing access to nourishing meals with food education, we can improve academic outcomes and support children’s socioemotional development and wellness. Dedicated lessons on cooking and gardening that incorporate social and emotional learning can set children up for a lifetime of healthy habits. Speaking at the African-American Mayors Association conference in Atlanta in April, the mayor of Greenville, Mississippi put it simply: “FoodCorps is saving lives in Greenville and the Mississippi Delta.”
With pride, we have increased the living allowances we pay our corps members to $33,000 for an 11-month service term. Notably, eighty percent of our students represent BIPOC identities, and 82 percent rely on free or reduced-price meals for daily nutrition. FoodCorps has been inundated with 1,460 applications for the AmeriCorps positions we seek to place next year, and 72 of our current AmeriCorps members have applied for a second year with FoodCorps. This surge in interest underscores the critical moment we are in, poised to demonstrate the profound impact of AmeriCorps programming and elevate children’s wellbeing as a national priority.
FoodCorps’ impact and the work of other organizations like ours who want to ensure that every child, in every school, experiences the joy and power of food, is needed now more than ever. We need to invest in expanding and strengthening AmeriCorps so that we can help more students, not less.