WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, Congressman Andy Kim (NJ-03) voted to pass the Keep Kids Fed Act, bipartisan legislation to extend key flexibilities for schools and nonprofits to serve meals to children this summer and during the 2022-2023 school year. The bill also addresses recent supply chain challenges and high food costs by delivering additional funding to schools, afterschool programs, and daycare providers offering free and nutritious meals.
“The pandemic shed a bright light on child hunger in our community and across our country. Expanding and extending federal assistance will help families put food on the table,” said Congressman Kim. “I am proud to support the Keep Kids Fed Act that will deliver nutritious meals this summer to the more than 12,000 local children who otherwise would not have enough to eat. Food insecurity and summer hunger are not short-term or localized issues. My Summer Meals REACH Act would make these temporary improvements for summer meal programs permanent. I hope we can build off of this critical legislation and secure long-term changes for school and summer meal programs that support the health, education, and well-being of our country’s next generation of leaders.”
“NJ SNA applauds Congress for recognizing the needs of our families and communities as we recover from the COVID pandemic and are still dealing with the effects of supply chain issues,” said Sal Valenza, Chairman of the New Jersey School Nutrition Association (NJ SNA) Public Policy and Legislation Committee. “School nutrition professionals across the state have been providing a safety net against food insecurity for the past two years and are grateful that we will be able to continue to serve our communities in that way. We still hold out hope that Congress will recognize that nutrition is an incredibly important part of students’ day, and that the need to provide meals at no cost to families for all students under universal feeding will be reconsidered for future school years.”
The legislation includes a temporary extension of flexibilities in the Summer Food Service Program (SFSP) that made meals more accessible to children during the COVID-19 pandemic, based on Congressman Kim’s Summer Meals REACH Act (H.R. 5424). Congressman Kim’s bill would make permanent some of the flexibilities that have allowed more community sites to serve free meals during the past two summers, including:
- Eliminating the area eligibility requirement, allowing all sites to serve free meals to all children;
- Eliminating the congregate feeding requirement, allowing grab-and-go meal service to continue; and
- Modifying the monitoring requirements to allow sponsors to continue to monitor sites remotely, a flexibility that has allowed more community partners, like the Ocean County YMCA, to operate summer meal sites for the first time.
The Summer Meals REACH Act is endorsed by Hunger Free New Jersey and the New Jersey YMCA State Alliance.
Congressman Kim has been a leader on hunger issues in Congress, voting to increase SNAP benefits and other programs through the CARES Act and American Rescue Plan to help ensure working New Jersey families can put food on the table. He advocated and helped secure fundingfor the White House Conference on Hunger, which will be held in September 2022– the first time since 1969. Last summer, Congressman Kim highlighted solutions to address hunger in a week-long tour across Burlington and Ocean Counties.
Congressman Kim is a member of the House Armed Services Committee, the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and the House Committee on Small Business. More information about Congressman Kim can be found on his website by clicking here.
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