 Okay, so we're coming to you from Nowcast Studios on the sixth floor of San Antonio's Central Library. And this week we have with us Desmond Alexander of the Texas Hunger Initiative. Desmond came to San Antonio just a few years ago in 2011 after graduating from Fisk University with a degree in English and a degree in caring, I think. And in her five years in San Antonio, she's been a city core member at Roosevelt High School and an AmeriCorps VISTA at Texas Impact before joining the Texas Hunger Initiative in 2015. So tell me, what is the Texas Hunger Initiative? So we are a collaborative capacity building organization out of Baylor University and we work mainly towards ending hunger across the state of Texas. So we really fundamentally believe that hunger is something that shouldn't happen, especially in the United States, where the richest country in the world, this is something that a nation as rich as ours really shouldn't happen and affect as so many of our individuals in our country. So we try to approach the issue by looking at it in a collaborative way. We sort of seeing that the biggest issues in terms of getting resources to people sort of happen because through a lack of collaboration and inefficient use of programs or just policies that have been proven to be ineffective. So we try to work with local, state, and federal organizations in order to try and bring everyone to the table in order to really solve the issue of hunger. So basically fixing the inadequate collaboration, I like that, bringing people to the table and saying, hey, we can solve this if we get together. I mean, it's not a question of not enough food. It's absolutely a question of bringing resources and everyone's abilities to the table and trying to figure out what everyone can best contribute. So Texas Hunger Initiative came from, it's under the umbrella of Baylor University. And it's a nonprofit? Yes, it is. So we are entirely donor and grant funded. From my position, it is funded in large part through the Walmart Foundation and a lot of our central office staff. They are working very hard to leverage as many donors and funders as we can. And we work really hard to try and prove our value to the community. So we know that school districts during the year, particularly San Antonio School District and many other local school districts where 94% of the students are eligible for free lunch, school districts like that do a really good job of providing meals, including breakfast and lunch and sometimes after school and weekend food for students. But summer is a different issue, isn't it? Well, a lot of school districts, they do serve during the summer. But the problem is because of either issues of staffing or issues of funding, they can't continue all the way through the summer. So a lot of school districts end up ending their service at the end of June or in the first weeks of July. So that leaves an entire month where kids are sort of left to find meals for themselves. And luckily there are a lot of organizations such as San Antonio Food Bank, SA Youth, City of San Antonio Parks and Recreation that really try to meet that gap to serve summer meals to kids. Including right here in the San Antonio Central Library where teen services is one of the summer foods locations. So a lot of groups do it. Let's go back a notch. What happens when a child goes to school hungry or even spends the summer hungry? I mean, what's the cost? So if you think about sort of any time, as someone who worked in the school before, you could always tell the kid that was hungry when he came in on Monday morning. They would be lethargic, less likely to pay attention. They might need to go to the nurse's office because they're dealing with stomach pains because the last meal this kid might have had might have been lunch on Friday afternoon. So a lot of the time, this is met in my school districts truly try to do a really good job of really meeting the need of getting kids breakfast, lunch, even after school meals. But if you think about even those effects that it has on a student's ability to learn compound over a weekend, compound that over the 10 weeks of summer. And you're left with a lot of chance of where that's potential visits to doctor's offices. A lot of kids who show up like not having retained knowledge throughout the summer because they're not getting the food that they need. So without that nutrition, I mean, and regardless of whether they're doing educational things during the summer without that nutrition, they're losing, they're sliding backwards. And you also referred to something you said schools, obviously during the school year, they have the programs in place. But in the summertime, they may have like summer school program that lasts until June. And without the help of additional organizations, I think the term you referred to is that kids could go into the July slide or the summer slide, right? So a lot of times there can be a lot of misconceptions around the summer program. So because a lot of school districts, this coincides with their summer school programs, a lot of times families think this is just for summer school kids. And that's not the case. Any kid 18 and under can participate in summer meals at like schools within their district and beyond at any summer meal site throughout the city. It's just that a lot of times, again, there needs to be that communication there that this is a program that is available for everyone and really try to get the meal to the kid as much as possible as opposed to expecting them to always come and try to find it. And so kids need to know, and we try to make that clear on the map that we run on Nelcast, that nobody's there to check your, to verify your papers, your documentation, ICE is not going to be there. I mean, it's not something where there are barriers. Oh, no, not at all. This is definitely a program that is free for all alms and kids to come. There's no paperwork required. No one's going to ask for any income eligibility. This is something that if a kid shows up and they're hungry that they can expect to get a meal. That's really important. So what's the role of Texas Hunger Initiative during the summer? Now what are you trying to accomplish this summer? So a lot of my job is awareness. So I try to locate what we call promoters within the community. So they could be community activists, journalists. They can be individuals who work at hospitals, school districts, nurses, and really try to give them information in order to be able to pass on to people that they work with so that they know about the free summer meals. So it could be delivering Texas Department of Agriculture literature to health clinics or community organizations that people go to, things like that. I also try to recruit sites that will participate in the summer meals program. Because you said particularly when schools who have been offering these meals close after their summer program at the end of June, then the number of sites decreases by at least those schools and more sites are needed. So you need more sites now? Absolutely. Right now, according to Feeding Texas, the participation particularly along kids identified as food insecure in Bear County in summer meals is about nine percent. So what does that mean? So of the kids that have been identified as food insecure and of that there's about 120,000 that according to Feeding America have been identified as food insecure within Bear County, only about nine percent of those kids are participating in any kind of summer meal program. Wow. Only nine percent. So that means that more than 90,000 kids are not participating in this. So now explain for folks who are watching, what does food insecure mean? So food insecurity means a sort of interrupted access to consistent healthy meals. So that could mean either a family lives in a food desert or needs like financial needs whether it's for housing, whether it's for transportation. Those needs sort of trump the needs of like getting groceries. So maybe someone has to buy medicine instead of food that on for a particular month. Maybe someone's car broke down and they have to focus on being able to get to work as opposed to buying groceries that week. So it's sort of those choices that families and individuals have to make that sort of prevent them from being able to adequately feed themselves and or their children. Okay, so we just said only about nine percent of just in Bear County, and that doesn't count the all of South Texas, nine percent of those kids are participating, the other 91 percent are not participating in this, so you need to find additional sites and also additional participation from those kids. So let's go to the sites first. What do you need on sites? So for sites, you definitely need individuals who work with kids and who are willing to already active within their communities. The biggest thing for sites, they need to be places where people trust. So a local church is always a good place, a community center, parks and recreations like a community park, those are always great places. And also you need an activity because a lot of times kids, even though they're hungry, they want to go somewhere where they're going to enjoy themselves. So you need some sort of activity that the kids are going to consistently want to go back for. So camps are always a really great thing. Or even just having like a library or if you gave, like, I've seen so many kids, if you give them a basket of all, they're happy. So if you just give them something to do on a consistent basis, then they will show up for that meal. So say somebody's watching and they say, gee whiz, I think our church could do this or our synagogue could do this or our community park program could do this. What do they need to do? So I would encourage them to get in touch with me and I can put them in touch with a sponsor that could help provide them for a meal. And if they're outside of the San Antonio area, they could visit our website, TexasHunger.org, and all of my regional counterparts are listed on the website and they could get in touch with them to figure out if they could become a site. And what you'll do, I mean, they don't have to come up with the food. No. We connect them with organizations that would be able to provide them with food. They just have to come up with the structure and the volunteers or the staff and a place and hopefully a place that has some form of engagement for the students. Because at the end of the day, you want this to be a fun program for the kids, but at the same time, there is the heart where ultimately you're trying to feed them, but you kind of have to put the sugar out in order to get the kids to take the medicine sometime. So you need that fun activity in order to get kids to come for those meals consistently. Terrific. Terrific. So at Nowcast, we publish a map every year and last year it was used by 14,000 different families to find the nearest place for free food. And our map, the way it works, is that you type in your zip code or you're typing your address. And this map hops up the closest place to you that you can go and get free food and it also gives you a schedule and stuff like that. So that map works fairly well and you don't need an app for it. You can get it on your mobile and it just works. There are other ways, too, that people can find the nearest free food. One of them is by calling. So we really try to push people to call 211 and they'll be able to tell them where their nearest summer meal site is or they can use the texting tool. So if they text FOOD-TX or COMIDA-TX to 877-877, they will get the three nearest sites to them like once they text our location. Let's check that one more time. So it's either FOOD-TX or COMIDA-TX if you want it in the Spanish language. FOOD-F-O-O-D-TX to or COMIDA-TX. To 877-877-877-877-877 is your destination phone number and this is the message. Yes. And then once it'll give you a prompt for your address and then you type that in and you will get the three closest sites along with the times they serve, the meals that they serve and the dates in which they're open. So that's a pretty good, pretty fast response and it gives you all that information. So one more time. So somebody's watching this right now and they say, I really want to help. You've got a number of different things they can do. So they can visit our website so go to TexasHunger.org and we're always looking to leverage individual donors so if they really read up on our cause and really think that we are a great organization based on the work that we're doing, then we really encourage people to donate. But also they can get in touch with me through my email or any of my regional counterparts if they want to serve either as site volunteers or they want to serve as sites themselves and if they're families that are watching who really need those summer meals, again calling 2-1-1 or using the texting tool at 877-877, then that really is the thing to do. Okay. Or they can come up with a site. Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. So that's the place that somebody can participate and help try to change life for the better for some kids for this summer. Absolutely. It's all about trying to feed kids. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, thank you and thank you for being here. I really appreciate your taking the time. Thank you very much. And hopefully we can do some good. Absolutely. Okay.