PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Ronald McDonald House Charities Bay Area (RMHC Bay Area) is thrilled to announce that our Feed the Love in-hospital meal program has received the Local Programs Impact Award at the RMHC International Conference, which hosts over 255 RMHC chapters from 62 countries.
Feed the Love was launched during the pandemic from a pop-up tent outside UCSF Benioff Children's Hospitals Oakland, now provides nearly 70,000 meals a year at Bay Area children’s hospitals.
“The initial goal of Feed the Love was to ensure that families with ill children had access to affordable, healthy food during long hospital stays,” RMHC Bay Area CEO Laura Boudreau said. “This is such a proud moment for our chapter. We’re excited to continue expanding this critical service to more families throughout the region and thrilled that this award shines a light on a model that other chapters in our incredible RMHC system can replicate globally.”
The Feed the Love program was created after a two-year local impact study in partnership with Stanford School of Medicine revealed that 56% of families surveyed reported household food insecurity.
The program was launched in 2020, in partnership with World Central Kitchen and Steph and Ayesha Curry’s Eat.Learn.Play. Foundation.
Initially, the foundation paid local restaurants, who were struggling during the COVID-19 pandemic, to prepare and package meals. As the pandemic wound down and restaurants returned to normal operations, the emergency infrastructure and funding ended. However, RMHC Bay Area was able to sustain the program and expand to a second hospital, with strong private philanthropy and scalable catering partnerships.
RMHC Bay Area’s Feed the Love program currently provides lunch and dinner meals at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital San Francisco, and we intend to expand to Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital next year.
This program is funded in two ways: through discounted pricing from our catering partners and philanthropic support from our community.
“When families are dealing with an ill child, it’s the everyday stressors that can be especially hard,” RMHC Bay Area Board President Katty Coulson said. “Our goal is to help families focus on healing and it’s so inspiring to see how the Feed the Love program helps do just that.”
For more information about the Feed the Love and how you can support RMHC Bay Area, please visit: https://rmhcbayarea.org/help/feed-the-love/
