Leftover School Lunches Turned Into Free Take-Home Meals for Hungry Kids

By Kayla Kunkel April 3, 2019 at 5:21pm

An Indiana school district has partnered with a local nonprofit company to help ensure that its students have enough food to eat.

Elkhart Community Schools, located in the northern part of the midwestern state, noticed how much food excess they were producing each week as well as how many of their students were going home without any food.

Unsure about how to fix their problems, the schools partnered with a South Bend nonprofit called Cultivate Culinary.

“Mostly, we rescue food that’s been made but never served by catering companies, large food service businesses, like the school system,” Jim Conklin of Cultivate told WSBT. “You don’t always think of a school.”

Conklin said over-preparing is just a natural part of food production, whether it’s with a catering company or a school, but Cultivate has created a unique way to take that perfectly good food and to put it into the hands of those who need it the most.

Cultivate rescues unused food, repackages it into convenient frozen meal packages and distributes that repacked food to those who are “food insecure.”

According to their website, 100,000 people are unsure where their next meal will come from and 1 in 5 children also fall into this category.

The nonprofit’s mission is to help fight hunger in their community and their recent partnership with Elkhart Community Schools is an opportunity to achieve that goal.

According to Inside Edition, 64 percent of the student body Elkhart Community Schools district qualify for free or reduced lunches.

Natalie Bickel, the supervisor of student services, told WSBT that Cultivate is coming to recover food from Woodland Elementary leftover from their cafeteria three times a week with the hope to extend the program to other schools soon.

Twenty selected students will be able to take home eight frozen meals every Friday to ensure that they are able to eat over the weekend as well.

The program launched March 19 and will continue at Woodland Elementary School every week until the end of the year.

So far, the program has been received well by the teachers and the students of the school. Bickel told Inside Edition that there were “lots of smiles.”

“There is just a need,” Bickel said. “Our kids are hungry.”

It’s a need that Elkhart Community Schools hopes to fulfill with the help of Cultivate.

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