The Elkhart School District of Indiana has come up with a simple, yet effective solution for tackling student hunger and food waste. They started saving their wasted food to package it up for their students to take home on the weekend.
Many students depend on the free breakfasts and lunches provided by the school as their main source of food - so when there isn't any school, many of those students are going hungry on the weekends. And school administrators noticed a lot of their cafeteria food was going to waste. So the district decided to partner up with food rescue group Cultivate to collect, package, and freeze all of their unused food from school lunches.
Now every Friday for the rest of the school year, 20 at-risk students from Woodland Elementary School will get a backpack with eight frozen meals for their weekend at home.