Oskaloosa Summer Lunch Program Evolving To Better Serve
Oskaloosa Summer Lunch Program
Oskaloosa, Iowa – The middle of summer vacation is at hand. With school not in session some kids, for various reasons, may not be getting a much needed meal. The Oskaloosa Summer Lunch Program hopes to reach and help as many children as they can during this time.
Martha Comfort, Director of the Oskaloosa Summer Lunch Program, said that some changes in the program have taken shape as the year has progressed to better serve kids in the community. “The program has grown substantially. We added a new site this week at Southern Hills Apartments and we are now serving lunch 5 days a week at New Hope. We are serving far more meals than we did last year and we are seeing a lot of new faces – children and volunteers. I love partnering with New Hope and feel great support from the New Hope community.”
On July 13th, the program starting serving lunch at Southern Hills Apartments, in an outdoor location there. Also, on Monday, July 20th, Comfort says the program is “moving our Elementary School location to the Vanderwilt Park Playground, directly across from the Santa Clara Apartments. This site will be more visible to neighborhood and community children.”
The move to the Southern Hills Apartments location came “from a few moms asking to open a site at this location. Our first week has been very successful and we are serving several children at this outdoor site,” said Comfort.
All of these meals and locations are because of partnerships the program has developed. “This year we changed sponsors to the United Way of Mahaska County. Also, we added the Elementary School as a site and were fortunate to partner with the school district to prepare meals for the Summer Reading program children and all community children. This year we added paid kitchen staff, which is the reason for the growth. We can prepare more meals and therefore take on more needed sites,” explained Comfort.
The army of volunteers that is needed has helped to serve over 5400 meals this year versus a total of 2404 meals last year. “The week of July 13th, we served 456 lunches,” says Comfort. “We are encouraged by the USDA to partner with children’s programs, such as Day Camps, VBS, Library programming and other children’s programs, to provide meals and snacks as part of their camp programming. For example, we provide lunch and an afternoon snack to the library and also to the Daily Theatre camps. Part of our mandate is to go to where the children are – find places they hang out or programs they participate in and then offer a meal to them.”
Without volunteers, the program grinds to a halt. “Our volunteer base has grown and we have a lot of new people volunteering this year. Volunteers help at the sites with serving food and programming and sometimes they help us in the kitchen. I shortened the meal service time this year by 15 minutes in order to help our volunteers be able to volunteer during their 60 minute lunch break. By doing this, we have been able to get more volunteers and it hasn’t affected our meal service at all,” added Comfort.
“I made a decision this year, that in order to grow I needed to hire experienced Kitchen Staff. I hired Gwen Bresee, a retired caterer and Christine Williams, an experienced food service worker. Having kitchen staff has made all the difference in growing the program. They are experienced in food safety, being trained in ServSafe, and they are also experienced in quantity cookery. We have also had the added benefit of having MUSCO Summer Dependents working with us – Taylor Boyle and Cheyenne Jaquez.”
“The lunch program’s growth is only limited by manpower made up of staff and volunteers. You can definitely say that the lunch program is a community sponsored program, as it takes a community of volunteers to make this program work and be a success,” says Comfort.
If you would like to learn more about the program, you can visit them on their Facebook Page HERE.
