Lebanon — Ensuring that by 2020 no Boone County child goes to bed hungry, is the goal of a coalition of local groups calling themselves “Feeding Our Future One Child at a Time.”
An estimated 3,000 of Boone County’s children go to bed hungry, Theresa Hanners, director of The Caring Center in Lebanon, told Boone County Healthy Coalition members Wednesday.
“To me, that is unthinkable,” Hanners said.
The Indiana Youth Institute estimated that in 2011, 20 percent of the county’s estimated 11,992 school-age children receive free or reduced-price lunches; nearly 17 percent qualified for a free lunch.
“Our vision is that by 2020 ... we can say that every child in Boone County goes to bed with enough to eat,” Hanners said.
“People in poverty, in generational poverty, have gone through the most unthinkable things,” Hanners told a mesmerized audience at the Witham Family YMCA. “You know it’s too horrible, they couldn’t have made it up.”
Two local high school students are being given free meals “every few days,” Hanners said, because they have no other resources. The students are “couch surfing” — staying with friends — because they have nowhere to stay.
“We’re helping with that food, just to get them through school,” she said. “It’s really sad.”
Between The Caring Center and the Lebanon Boys & Girls Club, about 150 children are fed an after-school meal each day, Hanners said.
To address possible solutions, Feeding Our Future will hold the inaugural Childhood Hunger Panel Discussion on March 6 in the Witham Health Services Pavilion at the Boone County 4-H Fairgrounds.
See Thursday’s Lebanon Reporter for more on this story.
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