NERAHN: Northeast Regional Anti-Hunger Network

Recruiting Sponsors and Sites

In order for children to benefit from the Summer Food Service Program, there need to be sponsors and sites that are willing to administer and operate the program in their community. Recruiting sponsors and sites is one way to ensure that kids 18 and under have access to good nutrition in the summer when school is out of session. Below are some best practices for identifying and developing SFSP sponsors and sites.

Sponsors
Summer Food Service Program sponsors administer the SFSP for one or more meal sites within participating communities. Because the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) funds the SFSP, sponsors must ensure adherence to all USDA regulations pertaining to the SFSP. Sponsors are responsible for all financial and administrative aspects of the program including: hiring, training, and supervising program staff, monitoring sites, arranging for meals to be prepared and delivered to sites, and submitting reimbursement claims. Sponsors may be a public school department, local government agency, camp, or private nonprofit organization. For-profit companies are not eligible to sponsor SFSP sites. Sponsors receive a per meal reimbursement by the state entity that administers the program. The reimbursement rate is adjusted each year and is intended to cover the administrative and operating costs for the program. All food served as part of the SFSP must meet specific federal nutrition guidelines and can be prepared on-site or purchased from a vendor. Meals may be hot, cold, or a combination of both depending on the vendor's capabilities. For information on sponsor training, contact the agency that administers the SFSP in your state.

Food Service Directors in the local school district are often the best option for sponsorship of the SFSP because of their familiarity with federal nutrition program regulations and meal patterns. However, there are a number of other organizations that can successfully sponsor the program.

Possible SFSP Sponsors:

School Food Service Directors
City/Town Parks and Recreation Departments
Churches
Community Service Organizations/Community Action Programs (CAP agencies)
Boys and Girls Clubs
YMCAs
Housing Authorities

Strategies for Recruiting SFSP Sponsors

Hold a community meeting and invite all potential sponsors from the community (community agencies, churches, emergency food programs, school officials, Parks and Recreation Departments, or other non-profit organizations). Focus the discussion on the needs in the community and the possible roles for the attendees including sponsorship, site management and supervision, site programming, and outreach.

For more information, see Building a Community Coalition.

Meet with the Mayor or an elected official to obtain recommendations or assistance in securing a sponsor.
Send out letters and / or make cold calls to likely sponsors.
Encourage potential sponsors to participate by providing incentive grants and ongoing technical assistance.

Because sponsors assume administrative and financial responsibility for the SFSP in their community, it is necessary that they fully understand the regulations and requirements of the program. Supporting new sponsors during the application and summer planning process as well as throughout the summer is critical. Project Bread has created a SFSP sponsor toolkit that can be downloaded and distributed to new and returning SFSP sponsors.

The methods used to recruit a new sponsor may also help identify new sites and elevate the importance of the SFSP within a community.

Community Examples:

The SFSP did not exist in Plymouth, MA before 2007 even though the community had been eligible for two years. During conversations at the December 2006 Community Forum on Hunger, which was co-hosted by the President of the Massachusetts Senate and Project Bread, it was obvious that there was enough community support to bring the SFSP to Plymouth. As a result, Project Bread provided technical assistance and grant funds to the Plymouth Public Schools food service director to help him become a SFSP sponsor and to purchase the food preparation and distribution equipment necessary to get the program off the ground. The sponsor was pleased to provide meals to Plymouth children through the SFSP and is committed to expanding the program to reach more children. Project Bread also helped the sponsor establish connections with two sites that were glad to receive free meals for their children for the first time.

In the summer of 2006, the Housing Authority in Albany NY, the primary SFSP sponsor in the city, told the Nutrition Consortium that it was having the worst summer in more than 20 years of running the program. There were too many sites to effectively manage, the sites weren’t cooperating with the Housing Authority, there was no time for outreach, and they had no capacity to expand to additional sites. Remarkably, after the work of the Nutrition Consortium and its local partners in the summer of 2007, the Housing Authority reported the best summer ever due to the addition of a second sponsor, the expansion of sites in the parks where children were already gathered, and improved coordination and outreach with the help of other partners in the community. Participation increased and meal quality was greatly improved.

Sites

A SFSP site is the physical location where program meals are served and consumed. Sites may be located in a variety of settings, including schools, recreation centers, playgrounds, parks, churches, community centers, day camps, residential summer camps, housing projects, and migrant centers. The most effective sites are those that provide recreational or enrichment activities in addition to the meals.

Sites are generally classified as either open/area or closed/enrolled.

Open/Area sites provide free meals to all children 18 and under who attend the site and do not require any registration or identification. These sites must either draw their attendance from a school in which 50 percent of the children enrolled are eligible for free or reduced price school meals or be located in an area where at least half of the children under 19 live in a household whose income is at or below 185 percent of the federal poverty level. Census data may be used to document that the site is located in a census tract that meets these criteria.

Closed/Enrolled sites provide free meals to children enrolled in an activity program. These sites must ensure that 50 percent or more of the children who attend the site are eligible for free or reduced price school meals. Closed/enrolled sites may document this information with school data, census data, or income eligibility forms. Unlike open/area sites in which all children are allowed to attend the site, closed/enrolled sites may limit program participation to those children enrolled in the program(s).

Strategies for Recruiting SFSP Sites

Identifying New Sites

Postcard mailings

Send a site recruitment postcard to anyone that might operate or know of summer programs for kids that could qualify for the SFSP. Postcards are better than letters because they can be easily tacked to a bulletin board until the recipient has an opportunity to read it unlike letters that frequently get lost under a stack of papers.

Community meetings and presentations

For more information, see Building a Community Coalition.

Consider the following when recruiting sites:

Focus on locations that already attract kids during the summer (parks, pools, spray parks, housing authorities, etc).
Look into programs offered in the evening hours to draw older kids or teenagers.
Partner with summer reading programs at local libraries or with summer school programs at local schools.
Focus on sites that meet open site eligibility, as these will serve the greatest number of children.

Community Example:
In 2007 there were only two SFSP sites in Poughkeepsie, New York, which significantly limited program access. Because there is very little public transportation and most of the low-income population does not live within easy walking distance of these sites, it was vital to increase the number of sites in the community. Hunger Action Network of New York State worked aggressively to identify new sites by speaking with human service agencies, emergency food programs, faith groups, and various youth service programs, and successfully recruited three new sites. These sites were spread throughout Poughkeepsie in the North, West, and East sides of city. Adding these sites greatly impacted program participation.

Determining Site Eligibility

For open/area sites:

Contact your school district’s food service director or the state agency that administers the SFSP to identify area eligible schools in your community—i.e. those in which 50 percent of the students are eligible for free or reduced price meals.
Check whether the site falls within an area eligible census tract by using the Food Research and Action Center’s online GIS mapping tool.

For closed sites:

Use either of the strategies outlined for open/area sites OR
Determine whether at least half of the children enrolled in your program are eligible for free or reduced price school meals. To do so, you can either use income eligibility forms or provide the names of the children enrolled in your program to your district’s school food service director and request confirmation for whether those students qualify for free or reduced price school meals. As long as at least half of the children qualify, then all children at the site can eat for free. The food service director is allowed to share this confidential information with interested sites because it is for the purpose of establishing eligibility for another federal nutrition program.

Determining Site Location
Be sure to consider site location and physical attributes, as this will impact the success of the site.

Recommendations for physical location of sites:

Look for sites that offer both shade for hot days and a covered eating area for rainy days.
Make sure that sites are easily accessible. Children are more likely to attend if they can walk to the site.
Make sure that the site is in a safe location. Parents will only want to send their children to sites that they think are safe from violence, drugs, dangerous intersections, etc.
Ensure the cleanliness of both indoor and outdoor sites.
Identify areas where kids congregate.

Avoid establishing multiple small sites in close proximity to each other that attract the same children. Maintaining one large site instead of two small sites is a better use of resources.

Suggestions for Programming
The most successful sites are those that offer programming in addition to the meals since this ensures greater participation. For this reason, it is ideal to add SFSP meals to existing programs. Established programs also benefit from having staff that can monitor meal distribution in addition to coordinating and supervising activities. However, not all communities or neighborhoods that could benefit from meals have programming in place.

Potential sites that do not have adequate staff to run activities should consider recruiting volunteers from local universities or retired senior volunteer programs. Occasionally, local police departments, fire departments, and nutrition educators can assist with programming. If some staff funding is available, it is worth researching youth employment programs in your community, since teenage staff can often draw kids to the site. Volunteers and staff can oversee arts and crafts, games, sports tournaments, and other activities that appeal to kids. Planning activities that require children to come back each day for a week in order to complete the project is also a good idea.

Obstacles
Despite the best efforts of SFSP advocates and community members, there are some obstacles to recruiting sponsors and sites that are difficult to surmount.

Staffing:
Staff are needed at sites to hand out the SFSP meals, fill out the SFSP paperwork, and where there is capacity, do activities with the children. If a sponsor or site does not have the capacity to hire a staff person to hand out meals and fill out the required paperwork, the site cannot open. This happened in a few of the communities involved in the UPS Project and prevented some potential expansion in 2008. Project coordinators tried in some cases to fill this gap by recruiting volunteers, but with limited success. Additionally, there were some sites that had to close early in 2008 due to staffing issues.

Staff changes between summers can also make it difficult to work on program expansion. Often the new staff person is unfamiliar and inexperienced with the SFSP and needs to learn the program rules and regulations from the beginning. In some cases, program maintenance, rather than expansion, is often the best that can be achieved under these circumstances. Alternatively, staffing changes can sometimes present opportunities for expansion if a new staff person is excited and capable of handling an increased capacity.

Geography
In rural and suburban areas, finding eligible sites is often difficult because USDA regulations require that 50 percent of children in an area be eligible for free or reduced-price meals during the school year. In places where poverty is not as intensely concentrated geographically but is still a significant problem, this can limit the number of eligible SFSP sites. This was particularly challenging for target communities in both New York and Vermont during the UPS Project.

Learn More about the UPS Project
UPS Project Background
Organizational Profiles and Contact Information
Results

Read More SFSP Best Practice Tools
Identifying and assessing a target community to build a work plan
Building a community coalition to support a work plan
Conducting outreach
Addressing meal quality