Oakland’s Free Summer Meals for Kids Will Resume at Full Force When School Lets Out

Oakland city leaders on Monday detailed the return of a civic program that has served free meals to thousands of kids over the summer for the past four decades and is again set to operate at full capacity this year after private funders stepped in to save it from the city’s budget crisis.

The program had been canceled just two months before school let out, after officials cited “severe city budget constraints.” Days later, the city said it had found a way to continue offering meals only at libraries and city-run sites, but not the 20-plus nonprofits that previously took part. Now, it is expected to once again deliver as many as 2,100 daily lunches and snacks to at least 47 sites throughout the city, including many libraries, recreation centers, nonprofits and churches.

Food service is set to begin May 27, immediately after the end of Oakland’s school year, and continue into the second week of August. Meals are available to all children 18 and under, as well as some adults with disabilities.

A full list of sites offering lunches this summer can be found on the city’s website, as well as through the CA Meals for Kids app.

The program’s revival comes after the East Bay Community Foundation and Eat. Learn. Play., a nonprofit founded by Steph and Ayesha Curry, recently agreed to contribute up to $375,000 to continue food service at the roughly 21 community sites that the city had informed in late March that the meals they were expecting to soon start serving would not be available.

“It was quite demoralizing having to be the bearer of bad news, especially having been this close to the program over the past few years and having experienced firsthand the amount of need,” said Michael Akanji, an analyst in the Oakland City Administrator’s Office who oversees the summer program and sent out the email to partner sites. “I was sad at the prospect of kids showing up this year … to be turned away because there was no food. Relief is my primary emotion at this point, just knowing that that does not have to be the case. It’s an extremely important program.”

Using money from the U.S. Department of Agriculture grant that has partially funded the program, the city will also continue to provide approximately 950 meals per day to 26 city-run sites, including libraries and recreation centers, at a cost of about $427,000 for the summer, the city said. Despite previous messaging, it said those meals — to city-run sites — had always been guaranteed.

The city is contracting with School Foodies in Hayward and Flo’s Friendly Food in Emeryville to prepare and deliver meals to all 47 sites, Akanji said.

“It’s a lot of meals. But I’m confident in their ability to meet that demand,” he said, noting that the two organizations were selected from a number of providers that submitted proposals at the beginning of the year.

With the help of outside funders, Akanji said, the city can now provide nearly 350 more meals per day this summer than it did last year.

That number “was based on individually canvassing the community-based sites and asking them what they anticipated their demand would be this year,” he said. “And that is just based on the economic trends over the past few years. When food is getting [more] expensive, these programs are more and more vital.”

The city’s cancellation announcement in March followed a City Council vote in December to reallocate funds from its sugar-sweetened beverage tax, part of a frantic effort to close what was then a nearly $130 million budget shortfall. The tax, which voters approved in 2016, generates more than $7 million a year, a portion of which is intended to support youth health-related programs, including the summer food service.

Oakland previously used about $200,000 of that revenue each year to supplement funding for the food program and cover administrative costs, but officials said the money was no longer available this year as a result of the reallocation.

Akanji said he didn’t send the note to partner sites until late March because he had been waiting for funding information from the city, which never came.

“We had not received any indication that anything was going to be available,” he said. “And at that point it was important to let the sites know, in order [for them] to make other arrangements.”

The responses he got were ones of “just almost desperation, like, ‘We don’t have any other options,’” Akanji said, adding that he also had the far more rewarding task of calling all 21 sites a few weeks ago to tell them that the funding had been restored.

Brandi Howard, the president of the East Bay Community Foundation, is a third-generation Oakland resident who participated in the summer food program when she was a kid.

“This was deeply personal for me,” said Howard, who received free summer lunches at Manzanita Recreation Center in the 1980s. “So, when I learned about the funding gap of the program, I knew it was just the moment for EBCF to get involved.”

Howard said that at this point, her foundation is only committing to supporting the program for this summer, but she hinted at the possibility of ongoing support amid ongoing threats to the public safety net.

“What I’m clear about is there was a moment where children may not get fed, and now we’re at a place where children will get fed,” she said. “That was the outcome, and that I’m really proud of.”