That Pop-Up Restaurant: Innovation in a Summer Feeding Program

Objective: That Pop-Up Restaurant Summer Food Service Program (SFSP) was a federally reimbursed program that first served healthy meals to families in a rural Kansas community during the summer of 2017. The program aimed to empower communities to address child hunger by reducing stigma concerning food assistance and providing high-quality, nutritious meals to families. This pilot was developed to increase low utilization rates of summer feeding programs. Methods: An ecological approach was implemented to engage students and families. Program innovations included an open menu ordering format with paid adult meals and proper food storage while maintaining USDA’s nutritional requirements. Additionally, the menu options exceeded fruit and vegetable requirements. Results: On average, 9.6% of youth who participated in the free and reduced-price lunch programs participated daily in summer nutrition during the 2016-2017 school year (FRAC, 2019). Comparatively, That Pop-Up Restaurant’s pilot had over 25% of eligible youth participate in the program one or more times. Conclusions: That Pop-Up Restaurant summer food service program showed promising results for the target population and program developers aim to replicate the program in various communities.

Discourses of Childism: How covid-19 Has Unveiled Prejudice, Discrimination and Social Injustice against Children in the Everyday

Do children suffer from discriminatory structures in society and how can issues of social injustice against children be conceptualised and studied? The conceptual frame of childism is examined through everyday expressions in the aftermath of policies affecting children in Sweden, the UK and Ireland to develop knowledge of age-based and intersectional discrimination against children. While experiences in Sweden seem to indicate that young children rarely suffer severe symptoms from covid-19, or constitute a driving force in spreading the virus, policy decisions in the UK and Ireland to close down schools have had detrimental effects on children in terms of child hunger and violence against children. Policy decisions that have prioritised adults at the cost of children have unveiled a structural injustice against children, which is mirrored by individual examples of everyday societal prejudice.

A Short Null Report on the Relationship Between Online Learning and Various Outcomes

Using COVID Pulse Data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau I establish that there are weak to nocorrelational relationships between a household reporting a child attending virtual or in-person school andvarious outcomes including expectations of loss of employment, child hunger, anxiety. Due to the coarsenessof the data, it is unclear if this is an artifact of the data or a reflection of the lack of underlying causalrelationships between mode of schooling and the outcomes. Therefore, these results should not be used tomake policy decisions or draw substantive conclusions about the decision to reopen schools and are reportedonly to avoid the file-drawer effect.

Does Household Food Insecurity Reflects Diet Quality of Children? A Study among the B40 Families in Pendang, Kedah

Food insecurity is interrelated with low food supply consumption which have high disposition to poor diet quality. However, less study has been done in assessing the relationship between food insecurity and diet quality of children in Malaysia. Therefore, this study objectives are to determine food insecurity level and diet quality of children from B40 families in Kedah. This cross-sectional study was carried out among 106 children aged 7 – 12 years old from one selected district in Pendang, Kedah. Radimer/Cornell Hunger was used to determine food insecurity level of the children, while diet quality of the children was assessed by applying modified Healthy Eating Index (HEI) 2005. Based on the result, 43.4% of the household were categorized as food secure while 56.6% were food insecure. Those food insecure were classified into three levels and the study found that 61.0% were household food insecure, 28.0% were individual food insecure and 11.0% of the household were child hunger. About 28.3% of them had poor diet quality, 69.8% of them had diet that needs improvements and only 1.9% of them had good diet quality. However, there was no significant relationship found between food insecurity and diet quality of these children (p = 0.436). This is somehow indicated that food insecurity does not reflect the diet quality of children from the B40 families in this study.

Using Smart Simplicity to tackle complex global challenges: Chronic child hunger in Tanzania

This paper explores a new way of tackling global problems that are complex by nature using an approach that creates an environment in which people work together in a different way. A clear illustration of the power of this approach - based on state-of-the-art findings in the social sciences - in developing innovative solutions that lead to greater impact is chronic child hunger and the stunting that results from it, which is the focus for this paper. In many countries, stunting affects more than 30-40% of children, and is responsible for severe and long-lasting health, social and economic problems. We argue that the reason such problems persist is that as there is no single, simple solution, the response is often to create new structures, processes and systems, which adds counterproductive layers of complicatedness on top of the initial complexity of the challenge. Instead, what is needed is to shape the context and, as a result, the behaviours of all actors. We call this approach Smart Simplicity. Rather than add to complexity, the idea is to work with existing stakeholders and within existing structures and to foster collaboration. And while this paper focuses on chronic child hunger and stunting, this is an approach that can be applied to a wide range of complex problems.

Food insecurity, childhood hunger and caregiver life experiences among households with children in South Carolina, USA

Objective:We explored how positive and negative life experiences of caregivers are associated with household food insecurity.Design:The Midlands Family Study (MFS) was a cross-sectional study with three levels of household food security: food secure, food insecure without child hunger and food insecure with child hunger. Ordinal logistic regression analysis was used for analyses of negative and positive life experiences (number, impact, type) associated with food insecurity.Setting:An eight-county region in South Carolina, USA, in 2012–2013.Participants:Caregivers (n 511) in households with children.Results:Caregivers who reported greater numbers of negative life experiences and greater perceived impact had increased odds of household food insecurity and reporting their children experienced hunger. Each additional negative life experience count of the caregiver was associated with a 16 % greater odds of food insecurity without child hunger and a 28 % greater odds of child hunger. Each one-unit increase in the negative impact score (e.g. a worsening) was associated with 8 % higher odds of food insecurity without child hunger and 12 % higher odds of child hunger. Negative work experiences or financial instability had the strongest association (OR = 1·8; 95 % CI 1·5, 2·2) with child hunger. Positive life experiences were generally not associated with food security status, with one exception: for each unit increase in the number of positive experiences involving family and other relationships, the odds of child hunger decreased by 22 %.Conclusions:More research is needed to understand approaches to build resilience against negative life experiences and strengthen positive familial, community and social relationships.

Mapping Nutrition Interventions, a Key Analytical Tool for Informing the Multisectoral Planning Process: Example From Burkina Faso

Background: The government of Burkina Faso, along with the United Nations Network for Nutrition (UNN), activity REACH (Renewed Efforts Against Child Hunger and undernutrition) partnership, conducted a mapping of nutrition interventions and stakeholders to identify the best approaches for scaling up priority nutrition interventions and to strengthen a multisectoral response to fight malnutrition. Objective: The objectives include describing the process used to map a set of country-prioritized nutrition interventions and to describe how the results contributed to the multisectoral nutrition planning process in Burkina Faso. Methods: The mapping exercise was designed as a cross-sectional study using the Excel-based Scaling Up Nutrition Planning and Monitoring Tool (SUN PMT) to collect, store, and analyze data. Results: The results present different analyses produced by the SUN PMT for 29 prioritized nutrition interventions. The analyses include the distribution of nutrition stakeholders for each intervention, the calculation of geographic and population coverage for each intervention, and the utilization of delivery mechanisms to reach beneficiaries. Conclusions: The mapping of key nutrition interventions and stakeholders supporting those interventions in Burkina Faso was an important tool in the multisectoral planning process. The exercise made it possible to identify gaps and needs; launch a discussion on nutrition planning and the scaling up of interventions; and mobilize sectors and development partners around nutrition.