Moore: A new nonprofit based in central Arkansas is launching to help address food insecurity and student meal access. Aaron Utley is the founder and CEO of The Lunchbox Fund. He says that as the father of five school-age children, he saw the impact of having access to free school lunch during the COVID pandemic.
Utley: We saw the effects of having that removed — and not just for our family, because fortunately we're typically able to provide the funding for school meals. But then their friends, we saw families that are struggling within our community and kind of noticed that there was a pretty significant gap. I come from a background of fundraising and I see a lot of opportunity with businesses around the state and around the country that focus on food security. And it seems like, considering where we live and the support and resources that we have, that it was a pretty substantial gap that we identified when we saw the lack of support around school lunches.
Moore: And it's no secret that Arkansas is the most food insecure state in the nation. I imagine that plays a role in the why behind this, too.
Utley: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's 19% of all Arkansas families and 25% of all Arkansas children — one in four — that face food insecurity. We've become one of the most food insecure states in the country. It ends up being around 168,000 children that are affected.
Moore: We hear the why. Tell me about the what. What does The Lunchbox Fund actually do?
Utley: We wanted to make it as simple as possible. There are a lot of programs that address food security — I have friends that work at the food banks here in Arkansas. So we wanted to make it really simple. We had some initial conversations with a few of the school districts around the state, and we decided that the best and most direct way to have an impact on this mission was to partner with school districts and use our experience in fundraising to pay the school meal account balances directly with the school districts. We write up an agreement with the school districts and essentially ask them to prioritize the highest-risk accounts first. So not only is our goal to help the school districts with rising food costs and issues they have maintaining this as part of their budget, but also the families who are struggling and having those bills added on top of what they're already dealing with, with rising costs in general.
Moore: You had a pilot program that ran last school year. Tell me about what you learned from that experience, what went well, and what are ways that you see, "OK, I'm not going to try that again."
Utley: It was really that. We have a funding model that we built — a lot of trial and error — trying to figure out what works best as far as paying the schools directly and what we prioritize. One of the lessons we learned was prioritizing the highest-risk school meal accounts first. And then one of the other biggest things we learned was just the need for this. We didn't really understand how the school districts handled these balances. The school districts are not uniform in how they address them, and a lot of them have had some media attention because of how they've addressed them. But overwhelmingly, the schools do end up incurring a lot of the costs associated with this. As much as we love to help the families and assuage this financial stress off of them, it really helps the school districts who are already struggling with lowered funding because of lower enrollment rates. So we're also looking at expanding into more rural school districts for that exact reason.
Moore: Right now you're based in central Arkansas. Do you hope to expand to Northwest Arkansas, northeast, the Delta?
Utley: Yes. Our initial fundraising campaign for the next school year is going to be focused on partnering with schools. We're actually finalizing a partnership with one of the schools in Northwest Arkansas and having some conversations with schools in the Delta. Our goal for this year is to expand to around 10 to 15 school districts. We built a model that allows us to set a baseline, and the more money we raise throughout the year, the more we add to that monthly payout. So they know there's a baseline of what they're going to get from us, and as we raise more money, they're just going to keep getting more. We'd love to be statewide. And I'm having conversations with other organizations around the country where this is an issue. If we can help address that elsewhere and use Arkansas as the model for that, we'd love to do that as well, because the whole goal and the whole mission — and you'll probably hear us say it ad nauseam — is that no child should go without lunch.
Moore: Aaron Utley is the founder and CEO of The Lunchbox Fund. You can find more details about the organization and how to get involved at lunchboxfund.org
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