Did you know that more than 1 in 5 American children are at risk of facing hunger?
Dion Harrison, a TangoTab community member and Feed The City volunteer host, recently shared a story with us that sheds light on the realities that kids battling hunger face.
Dion recounted talking to a child getting food from The SoupMobile, a mobile soup kitchen that gives meals to people who need them.
Dion asked the child what his favorite subject was, and the child replied enthusiastically, “Math!” The child talked about how much he loved math, and as the two kept chatting, Dion eventually asked him how his grades were in the subject.
The child then told Dion that he purposefully failed his math course during the school year so that he would be required to go to summer school. He knew that he could ace math in summer school and still progress to the next grade; he also knew that having to go to summer school would guarantee him access to meals during the summer.
To summarize, the child flunked math– his favorite subject– on purpose so that he could secure food for himself during the summer months between school years.
“It’s the reason I kept coming back to TangoTab. There were more opportunities to help kids like that,” Dion says.
For every 100 school lunch programs, there are approximately 87 breakfast sites and only 36 summer food programs. During weekends and holidays, children living in food insecure households oftentimes go without anything to eat.
This is one of the many reasons to #TangoTabIt. Every time you check-in to a partner restaurant or coffeeshop using the TangoTab app, the monetary equivalent of one meal gets donated to organizations that provide meals to those desperately in need, like kids living in food insecure homes. As a TangoTab app user, you do not pay anything extra to provide the meal, you simply check-in and become an active part of fighting hunger.
Overtime, these meals significantly add up, and to date over 2,000,000 meals have been donated to those in need through the app. Don’t underestimate your ability to fight hunger — you absolutely can help positively impact your community! Every individual check-in on the TangoTab app matters because every meal that goes to an individual in need matters. This is how we can all help end hunger together.
A special thanks to Dion Harrison (pictured below) for sharing this story with us. If you have a similar story that you’d like to share, please email friends@tangotab.com.
Author: TangoTab
