Volunteers moved between stacks of boxes at a school in Ottumwa as they packed up food for 500 kids. There were eggs, hot dogs, pears, canned meals, fruit and veggie cups and more, all delivered by the Food Bank of Iowa for the state’s new summer food program.
“Hopefully everything’s packed by one, when the cars start coming,” said Kathie Mason, the volunteer in charge of distributing boxes of food to local families.
Cars were already lining up outside, where it was pouring rain.
Mason and her team of ten volunteers rolled carts of food through puddles to a shed where families drove up, and volunteers placed boxes and bags of food in each car based on how many school-aged kids were in the family.
She said she was asked to run this location when no one else in the county was able to make it work.
“And I said, ‘Yes, we have to have something for the people in Wapello County,’” Mason said.
Over the past few months, Iowa tried a new way of fighting summertime food insecurity among kids. Most states joined the federal Summer EBT program and sent $40 per month on prepaid debit cards to low-income families to use at grocery stores. Instead, Iowa designed its own program called Healthy Kids Iowa to hand out healthy food each month. But the logistical challenges of distributing food to thousands of kids have food pantry leaders questioning if the program should return.
In Wapello County, which has the state’s second-highest rate of childhood food insecurity, this school was the only place where families could pick up food through Healthy Kids Iowa. It was open once a month for three hours.
“I know we’re not reaching everybody, because it’s just one site,” Mason said. “But I also know that we reached 366 [kids in June], and hopefully more this month. And so anything we can get out is a plus for us. My heart’s into it, and I just want any amount of food that we can get out, to get out.”
Across the state, Healthy Kids Iowa served nearly 47,000 kids in July, according to the Iowa Department of Health and Human Services. That’s less than the 65,000 children per month the pilot program was aiming to feed. And it’s just one-fifth of the estimated 240,000 kids whose families would have received money for food if Iowa had joined Summer EBT.
Still, Gov. Kim Reynolds promoted Healthy Kids Iowa at a news conference with Trump administration officials, who approved the program as a Summer EBT alternative. She said she’s making changes to nutrition programs because too much food assistance is being spent on sweetened drinks, snacks and desserts.
“And this truly isn’t helping low-income families,” Reynolds said. “In fact, it’s hurting them. And Iowans are seeing the impact of that. Thirty-seven percent of our adults and 17% of our youth ages 6 through 17 are suffering from obesity, and that’s something that as governor of this great state, I can’t accept.”
Food banks and pantries faced many challenges
It’s not yet clear if Healthy Kids Iowa helped kids eat healthier, but the challenges of providing food to thousands of kids across the state have become very clear.
The food banks and pantries tasked with purchasing, delivering, storing, packing and distributing the food put a lot of staff time and volunteers into the program, diverting resources from their regular services.
January Rowland runs the Independence Area Food Pantry, where she has the Healthy Kids Iowa items available five days a week.
“I don’t want it to sound ungrateful, like it was awful that we got all this food,” she said. “Yes, we got all this food. It just disrupted things greatly.”
Most pantries didn’t have a lot of extra space on their shelves and in freezers to store the large influx of food for the program. There weren’t options for special dietary and cultural needs. Some locations ran out of food. Others, like Rowland's, struggled to give all of the produce away before it went bad, because families did not want to take home three bags of apples per child at once.
“It’s not that this, what they set up, is awful,” Rowland said. “It’s — when there are such better alternatives — why would you do this?”
Nikki Habben, partnerships director for River Bend Food Bank in eastern Iowa, said she didn’t realize how much time and money it would take to implement Healthy Kids Iowa.
“I think it put a heavy burden on the food bank, because it did limit the other work that we were able to do this summer,” she said. “So I think the logistics and the resources would need to be thought about in great depth on whether or not this is something sustainable for food banks to do in the future.”
Alex Murphy, communications director for Iowa HHS, said the agency has heard these concerns from food banks and pantries.
“As we’ve said all along, this is a pilot project and this was the first year, so we expected there to be some challenges and growing pains, but we’ve worked alongside the food banks to listen to their concerns and address them as best we can,” he said in an email.
Murphy said HHS welcomes additional feedback to analyze what worked well and what may need to change in the future.
Andrea Cook, executive director of Johnston Partnership, which runs a food pantry, said some pantries are not interested in participating again unless there are major changes.
“My caveat has always been, what kind of changes can we make to make it better?” she said. “Because it’s not getting to as many kids, and it is harmful in so many ways.”
Cook also said a lot of families didn’t know about Healthy Kids Iowa, and for those that did, they had to find a way to get to a food pantry or visit a distribution site with limited hours.
Approximately one-third of counties had one Healthy Kids Iowa food pick-up site. About 40% of the approximately 250 food pick-up sites were open once a month, and around 22% were open at least three days a week, with the rest falling somewhere in between.
In Pottawattamie County, the Together food pantry in Council Bluffs was the only Healthy Kids Iowa site. Director of Operations Eric Webster said it was hard for parents to pick up food because the pantry is only open during typical work hours.
“I think for anybody kind of outside of Council Bluffs … it probably had no impact at all,” he said of the program. “For the families that we serve and that are close to us, I think it had a great benefit for them.”
Families can receive more than $40 of food per kid
There’s one thing everyone involved in Healthy Kids Iowa seems to agree on. Families that are able to access the food receive a lot more than what they could buy with $40 at a grocery store.
In Ottumwa, that was true for Angie Huisinga, a special education associate who was picking up food for her two teenagers.
“It just helps take the burden off your pocketbook for that amount of food,” she said.
Huisinga said the pick-up process in the school parking lot is “a little awkward,” but her kids enjoy the food.
“I feel either way it meets what we’re trying to do,” Huisinga said. “I feel this is just as good as the EBT card.”
But tens of thousands of Iowa kids didn’t get a box of food or money on an EBT card this summer.
“We are proud of the number of children and families that were served under the first year of the program,” Alex Murphy, Iowa HHS communications director, said in an email. “We hope to expand and build upon the pilot program and believe other states will introduce similar programs.”
HHS has been surveying families that participated in Healthy Kids Iowa, and Murphy said the agency is eager to review the results.
“We will share the results with USDA and look forward to ongoing dialogue about the best way to get healthy food to kids and families in the summer,” he said.
