Colorado has been hard at work to tackle child hunger. In 2022, Colorado voters passed Healthy School Meals for All, making breakfast and lunch free for school age children.
Most of Colorado’s 178 school districts are participating and there’s a commitment from school nutrition directors to select delicious options to get rid of the stigma that comes with “free school meals” especially when high school students reach the age where they can go off campus for lunch.
Speaking of food off campus, what about after school snacks or dinner? Having limited access to healthy foods is a reality faced by many Denver schoolchildren, especially those living in neighborhoods with poverty rates of 80-90%. You can see many of these neighborhoods in red here.
Healthy Food for Denver’s Kids, an initiative passed by voters in 2018, uses a sales and use tax increase of eight one hundredths of one percent, to provide healthy food and food based education to Denver schoolchildren. Denver Inner City Parish submitted a proposal to serve healthy meals and snacks outside of school hours and on four wheels and secured a grant for Greens-N-Grains.
By partnering with Denver Public Schools located in economically challenged neighborhoods, our Greens-N-Grains chefs can offer a consistent presence and reliably delicious food kids will enjoy after the school bell rings.
Greens-N-Grains is also available during the summer months at designated partner sites with meals, snack bags, recipe bags and fruit stand offerings. Regularly selected sites include schools, community centers, sporting events and parks.
While our main mission is to provide healthy food, we also serve up tips, recipes, games and hands on demonstrations to all who visit our truck. We have distilled our meals into recipes available online for families to recreate at home.
So far, Greens-N-Grains has served 50k+ meals to an average of 1,250 children, 13,000 snack bags, 9,000 recipe bags, 26,000+ snacks at school and 4,000 fruit stand bags.
We want to make sure that healthy meals and snacks are as readily available and maybe even easier to obtain than snacks available at the corner store or your local 7-11. Yes, Takis are absolutely delicious but we’d like to offer nutritious orange peppers, carrots or clementines to get your orange fix.
To ensure we are able to offer as many healthy meals to all Denver school aged children who need them, please support this program with a donation. One time and monthly donations are welcome and encouraged.
If you are affiliated with a group, school or community event serving economically disadvantaged school children, and want us to bring Greens-N-Grains to you, please fill out this form.