The Lunch Line Project: What School Lunch Debt Really Costs
For the inaugural episode of the Lunch Line Project, Fight Club Podcast host Elizabeth Swindell sat down with Alessandra Ferrara-Miller, founder and executive director of All for Lunch, to open a conversation that will define this series: what does it actually mean to be hungry at school in America?
When Alessandra Ferrara-Miller went online looking for a place to donate money to help a child pay for school lunch, she couldn't find one. So she built it.
All for Lunch, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit she founded in 2017, works with schools nationwide to pay off lunch debt and fund reserve accounts that keep students' balances positive. The idea is simple: make it easy for communities to show up for the kids in their midst. The problem it's addressing is anything but.
The organization was born after Ferrara-Miller heard about an eight-year-old boy whose lunch was taken away in front of his peers and who was sent home with a stamp on his arm that read "I need lunch money." She wanted to give, and she built the mechanism to help.
On what it actually looks like for a child:
"Some of these kids, they go through the lunch line, if their family doesn't have the funds, they can't get a school lunch meal alongside their peers, and it looks different across the country in different schools, but in some cases, they're having their food taken away and getting a bread and cheese sandwich. In other situations, you have kids carrying this debt from kindergarten all the way through high school and not being allowed to walk in graduation. So it really can impact their day. It impacts their confidence, their ability to focus and learn...and a lot of the time, it impacts just how they look at school and their experience in it. It could be…covered with shame or embarrassment, which are things we don't want our kids going through."
On why the information gap is a barrier:
"It's really difficult to understand school lunch right now because it varies district by district, state by state, so every district handles lunch debt differently. Everyone reports it differently. It's so hard to find information on the lunch debt and how you can help support your community, because sometimes it really is a treasure hunt where you're trying to go through just to see how much lunch debt a school has to see if you can help support them."
On what actually works:
"When you pay off the debt, you start back at zero. So the next day, this child's going back into debt. They're not moving forward. So the reserve accounts are so impactful, because once those kids are at zero, we're now giving them the opportunity to stay ahead, instead of carrying that debt and just going right back to it."
On what needs to change:
"Obviously, a world with universal free lunch would be amazing, where every student, regardless of income, has access to lunch at school. And I always like to just emphasize — some of these kids are five years old and they don't even understand the concept of money yet. My daughter is 14 in high school, and I think she still barely understands that we pay for her school lunch. But let alone a five, six, seven year old...to understand that you're having your food taken away because you don't have the money is something just so far above them and that they honestly shouldn't have to carry."
On what you can do right now:
"You can visit allforlunch.org. We support schools throughout the entire country. We have some states that do currently have free lunch already provided with a universal program. However, there are schools throughout those states that still have debt from before those were implemented. So every state, you can find schools or students that still have debt attached to them…you can make a donation, you become a one-time donor, a monthly donor. Businesses can support schools within their community, and we make sure that those funds are getting to the students on a monthly basis and trying to keep them lunch debt free."
This is the inaugural episode of the Lunch Line Project: an original interview series from Unite to Fight Poverty investigating what it means to be hungry at school, told through the adults who witness it every day. Listen to the full conversation with Alessandra here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/36T4PW33iNGwcKJg1jNgMj
