Number of Summer Meals Served in Ruidoso, New Mexico Doubled This Year!
Posted by Alice Pennington on Monday, July 11, 2011
Editor’s Note: All summer, Share Our Strength staff will be visiting summer meals sites across the country to show our work in action. This post is part of that series. To learn more about Summer Meals, visit strength.org/summer.
In New Mexico during the summer meals road trip, we met many amazing leaders fighting child hunger – leaders who are making sure kids in their community are being reached by the USDA summer food program no matter what barriers they encounter along the way. The USDA summer food program provides reimbursement to community organizations around the country that run summer meals programs for kids who normally receive free and reduced meals at their schools. The organizations’ leaders are creative, passionate problem-solvers who would go to any length to protect and serve children facing hunger.
One of those leaders was Victor, who directs the Community Youth Center Warehouse in Ruidoso, a small mountainous town in Lincoln County. The county is well known for being home to the Ruidoso Downs Race Track, which hosts the richest race in quarter horse racing in the world, but at the same time, almost 30% of the county’s children are living at or below the poverty line. Victor has not let the despairing statistics stop him from dedicating his life to helping youth reach their full potential. The youth center he runs is the only one of its kind in the area and in the summer they serve roughly 280 lunches a day to kids at various sites around the county, including parks, camps, and daycares. A small grant issued through Share Our Strength and the New Mexico No Kid Hungry Campaign helped Victor’s program with transportation costs and made it possible for them to open 3 new sites to reach the kids who have no way to get to the central sites.
Victor’s relentless spirit is refreshing; he spends tons of his time working on ways to improve his program and when you consider that he’s doubled the number of meals served since last summer – it’s pretty clear the hard work has paid off. Local outreach efforts coordinated with the help of local mayors and councilmen, radio stations, and church pastors have resulted in more families becoming aware of the program and more and more kids receiving a healthy lunch. The Ruidoso area summer meals sites are some of the first to open in New Mexico (May 23) and the last to close, and I have no doubt in my mind Victor will continue to find new ways to reach more kids in the years to come. I felt privileged to meet Victor and see in action how Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry Campaign is working to support programs like his. As we were saying goodbye to him, he told us humbly, “Every day I try to influence at least one adult to impact a child positively,” and I know, with no doubt in my mind, that Victor’s influence extends way beyond one adult every day!
Here is a chance to hear more from Victor:
RELATED LINKS:
— Learn more about Share Our Strength’s Summer Meals work
— Help Support Summer Meals Work
July 11, 2011 | 0 comment(s) | Tags: new mexico, summer meals
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