For many of the families Food For Free serves, July is the hungriest month of the year. When school-based nutrition programs close for the summer, kids and families struggle to make ends meet. 

Fortunately, Food For Free’s programs can help to close the summer “meal gap.”

Our Weekend Eats program (formerly the Cambridge and Somerville Weekend Backpack Program) worked with seven summer camps, providing weekly bags of food to 329 kids over the course of the summer. Food For Free volunteers packed the bags and delivered them to these sites on Friday mornings: SPELL, Adventure Day Camp, Daybreak, Haggerty, Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House, Y@PHA, and YMCA Somerville. 

This program is so important when it comes to meeting the nutritional needs of kids; these bags of food provide the stability & support over the weekends that children need to come back on Monday morning ready for another week of camp. Our excellent camp director relationships this summer also gave us opportunities to learn what foods were popular with kids in order to better serve them in the future! 

Meanwhile, our Summer Markets program gave out a total of 832 Just Eats Grocery Boxes to the Mystic River and Mystic View Apartments. The Food For Free Operations team dropped off the boxes while the Programs team ran the market with help from volunteers and staff at the Somerville Housing Authority. At the Clarendon Hill site we distributed a total of 215 boxes this summer!

Both of these programs have been essential, bringing food to families that live in communities that do not have access to many other food resources in the area and who needed help while school was out this summer.