School districts across the U.S. are beginning to close their doors for summer vacation, giving students a respite from classes and exams. But for millions of young people from food-insecure households, there’s less to celebrate—because summer break puts an end to the free and reduced-price lunches they’re eligible for during the school year.

Since 2011, in California, young people have found sustenance and assistance in an unlikely place: the public library. That’s the year the Oakland Public Library in Northern California started serving free lunches of sandwiches, fruit, and milk to local children at three of its branches. “We were seeing hungry kids coming in and staying the whole day,” says Derrick DeMay, Oakland’s supervising branch librarian. “Hungry kids act in ways that are unproductive. One solution is to say, ‘You’re out for not following the rules.’ But that doesn’t help anybody.”

Photo © Becky Ruppel Photography

The library’s decision to feed kids instead of ejecting them was quiet testament to the long, lingering shadow of food insecurity, which, despite some fluctuations, has remained consistent at around 12 percent of the nation’s households since the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) began tracking it in 1995. (That figure is 14.4 percent in Alameda County, which encompasses Oakland.) “A very basic need was not being met and we realized, these kids just need to be fed,” says DeMay.

At the California Library Association (CLA), program director Natalie Cole watched Oakland’s summer lunch experiment with interest, while amassing reports from librarians in other parts of the state about encounters with ravenous kids acting up and asking for snacks. In 2013, she and Patrice Chamberlain, director of the California Summer Meal Coalition, received a private grant to follow Oakland’s lead and pilot a summer lunch program at 17 California library branches.

This year, 198 public libraries across the state will serve an estimated 275,000 free meals, all fully reimbursed by the USDA, through the Lunch at the Library program that Cole—who is now program consultant at the California State Library—and Chamberlain established. Libraries in Ohio and other states have also adopted coordinated summer lunch programs in the wake of California’s efforts, although no one is keeping an official national tally.

Summer Food Program History and Challenges

Federally reimbursed summer lunches have actually been available for more than three decades. The USDA, which declined to comment for this story, enacted the Summer Food Service Program (SFSP) in 1975 in order to bridge the summer feeding gap. By 2011, the year the Oakland libraries started serving lunches amid their stacks, the USDA was reimbursing more than 130 million meals a year, served at community-based sites across the country (including the Oakland libraries) over the three-month break.

In California at least, those sites were often, logically, schools; kids were already congregated there for summer school and enrichment programs, and schools had the means to cook and serve food. But the 2008 financial crash caused schools to scale back their summer offerings. As a result, Chamberlain says, more than half the sites serving summer meals fell away—although, even before the crash there weren’t enough “to accommodate all the kids in need.” In fact, California misses out on millions of dollars worth of federal aid, partly because it has too few sites.

If a school without summer programs continued to serve lunch anyway, kids were less likely to turn up for it. Transportation was, and still is, an issue, and with no programs, there were no school busses to shuttle kids around. Stigma is also a barrier. “[Kids] stand out when there are no activities” for them, says Chamberlain.

In this context, libraries-as-lunch-sites begins to make a lot of sense: They’re often centrally located, offer books, activities, coveted air conditioning, and safety, and the USDA doesn’t require them or similar participating sites—including Boys & Girls Clubs, local parks, recreation centers, and churches—to ask for proof of need; Anyone under the age of 18 who shows up eats for free, no questions asked.

(Photo © Patrice Chamberlain)

There are obstacles to bringing in California’s 1.7 million summer-hungry kids to libraries, however. Finding the space to serve lunch at tables in the reading room or elsewhere, such as the foyer—where some busy branches set up—can be challenging.