Food is essential to children’s health and learning. Yet, currently as many as 1 in 6 Oregon children don’t have enough food to eat. Healthy school meals for all ensures that Oregon’s children get every opportunity to thrive, regardless of where they are in the state or how much their family makes.
Your gift enables our coalition to visit the Capitol to meet with lawmakers, provides barrier mitigation (childcare, translation services, transportation, etc) to support community participation, and provides the materials and labor needed to pass this vital statewide campaign.
It’s been incredibly personally healing to see how universal
– Food service employee in Colorado, where universal school meals were instated in 2023.
meals has equalized school meals and allowed all
students to access them without stigma. I would watch a whole
class come down for breakfast together or a whole class line
up for lunch, and it literally brought me to tears to see how
universal meals changed the culture of school meals. This was
worlds apart from my own childhood being one of a handful
of students getting school meals because we qualified for free
meals. This made me feel isolated from my friends, and as I
went on to middle and high school, I stopped eating breakfast/
lunch most days so that I wouldn’t feel the stigma of getting the
school meal.
