Annual Reports

REFLECTING ON 2024

Dear Friends,

As a backbone organization with more than 60 partners across the
state and nearly 10 years of experience, Hunger Impact Partners was
particularly well-positioned to respond in nimble and impactful ways to
numerous and sudden course corrections in the hunger space during
2024.

Once again, our proprietary Free Meals for Kids mobile app was the ‘go to” tool for helping hungry
kids.

It was wonderful that many communities stepped forward with sites serving meals, not just at schools, but at libraries, rec centers, hospitals, and faith-based locations. The challenge then became how to connect families who have children with these new sites in their neighborhoods. Our app did exactly that.

From our beginnings, we created the Free Meals for Kids mobile app, and we continue to manage, expand, and promote it.

As you know, Hunger Impact Partners provides grants ranging from $2000-$5000 for nutrition education, promotion and marketing, compliance training, start-up and infrastructure costs, technology solutions, listening sessions and staffing resources for the federal meal programs we support.

The year saw other direct investments in the hunger relief network.

The legislature provided the funding to implement Sun Bucks, which helps families
who struggle with food when the school year is out.
We worked to put Minnesota on the path to a Medicaid waiver to address health-related social needs like housing and nutrition.
The emergency food network – food banks and shelves – received $8.4 million in funding to source and distribute food.

Further highlights from 2024 include:

After School Meals

As planned, we established eight new after school meal serving sites reaching 500 elementary and middle school students during the 2024-25 school year.

These are high-quality after school programs for low-income kids that help close the achievement gap, keeps them safe and develop skills for success.

Our grants address barriers that included administrative requirements, lack of exposure, and education of the program’s value to students and their families.

Targeting marginalized neighborhoods that are eligible for meal support, we collaborate with community-based organizations that offer academic enrichment or remedial programs to help them establish meal sponsors, so they can serve meals during their programming.

We focus on meal gaps and support meal sponsor education, recruiting and trainings.

Summer Meals & Beyond

Our mobile app is also used to inform users of financial supports, opportunities to participate in research studies, and time-sensitive information via a “push” notification feature. We have nearly 50,000 active users statewide.

The app was developed to help kids, families, community partners and safety net service providers locate meals, food, and community resources.

We expanded it to include childcare center sites offering meals, after-school academic programs serving meals, summer programs that offer scholarships, free family meals sites, holiday food giveaways, backpack programs, Fare for All grocery sites, Twin Cities mobile market locations, and free summer feeding sites in economically eligible neighborhoods.

We continue to recruit new meal sponsors and fund expansion for existing sites, which is part of our core local community funding strategy. Sites are located at parks, rec centers, libraries, affordable housing complexes, community-based organizations, schools, whether public, private, charter, and tribal sites.

Childcare Center Meals

Working with our early childhood network of partners, we recruit centers who have the potential to provide meals but are not by developing a qualified lead generation process that can screen for citations, site capacity, and percentage of free/reduced children.

We provide education on CACFP, guides for evaluating sponsors and have developed a self sponsor toolkit.
We continue to advocate for federal/state program changes in CACFP to ease the administrative burden of operating sponsors.
We fund tablets and subscriptions for web-based record-keeping and financial management platforms to aid sponsors with reporting and compliance requirements.
We manage a Network Initiative with the Salvation Army, YMCA, Boys and Girls Clubs, and HeadStart to utilize CACFP for meals offered at their sites.
We have helped 17 childcare centers start meal programs now feeding 500 children birth to 5.

Healthy Food from Birth to 5

With only 50 percent of children ages 1-4 enrolled in WIC in Minnesota, we host frequent listening sessions learning about barriers to participation.

Focusing on children ages 2-4 whose families are not enrolled, working with the University of Minnesota School of Nursing, we developed a public health practicum to provide free medical check-ups at licensed childcare centers to facilitate certification in WIC and remote enrollment for eligible children.

We created a WIC promotion video for childcare centers to educate families on WIC’s nutritional benefits and online shopping option.
We also work with WIC agencies in Ramsey and Hennepin Counties through a collaborative we organized that includes the Minnesota Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Hennepin Healthcare, African American Babies Coalition and Head Start.

As I write this, we have 25 families enrolled in the medical check-up pilot.

I am proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish in such a short time. And I appreciate that a significant factor in our success is the caliber of business, government, education, and community leaders we work with.

I am grateful to be a citizen of Minnesota and share in the talent and vision of its leaders.