Community Organizations Partner to Open First Kids Cafe in Dallas ISD
With many families struggling to make ends meet, several community organizations have stepped up to ensure that students at one Dallas ISD learning center receive a hot, nutritious dinner three days a week before heading home. Dallas-based education nonprofit Big Thought, in partnership with the North Texas Food Bank, recently launched a new Kids Cafe program serving students in the Thriving Minds after-school program at Charles Rice Learning Center in South Dallas. This is the first time a Kids Cafe program has been available to students on a Dallas ISD campus.
Kids Cafe programs provide free meals and snacks to low-income children through a variety of community locations where children already congregate. The Kids Cafe at Charles Rice Learning Center provides meals to nearly 120 students three evenings a week. The Kids Cafe is a national program of Feed America and is administered locally by the North Texas Food Bank.
According to Feed America, every fourth child in Texas does not know where their next meal is coming from, and in Dallas that amounts to nearly 200,000 kids said Isaac Burren, program services manager for the NTFB during a ribbon cutting ceremony for the program on April 12.
“There is an immediate and exact correlation between what’s in someone’s stomach and what they are able to produce in the classroom. And this helps us go one step further to all these little ones right here reaching their dreams,” Burren added.
Funding for the Kids Cafe at Charles Rice was provided by Chase, which has been instrumental in supporting the academic needs of students in the South Dallas community through the Thriving Minds initiative.
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