Is There Anything You Can Do to Help?

It started with a simple question - Is there anything you can do to help? It was 2010, kids at Sheridan Elementary School were hungry and hoarding food to bring home on the weekends. Mill City Church was renting space in the school to hold Sunday service. That simple question provided the spark for Every Meal, based in Roseville, Minnesota, with the mission to fight childhood hunger through community and school partnerships. Their vision is to end childhood hunger by focusing on weekends and other times kids don’t have access to free and reduced meal programs. Every Meal provides 12,000 kids in Minnesota with meals each week, and they are working very hard to increase that number, because the need is so great.

Rob Williams, Founder and President

Photo Credit: Every Meal

Back in 2010, the Mill City Church pastor wanted to create a stronger relationship between the church and school. The request to help feed kids at the school provided the opportunity he was looking for. One of the church members tapped to help with the effort was Rob Williams, the founder and president of Every Meal. At the time, Rob was consulting with Fortune 500 companies like General Mills and Target about logistics and supply-chain issues. He was brought in to help figure out how to source and distribute food to the kids efficiently and discretely. In those early days, Mill City Church bought food from local supermarkets at wholesale prices. Volunteers then loaded the food into their cars and brought it to the school to be organized and distributed to the kids. They had a small room in which to do their work. Whatever food was left over was placed in sturdy storage containers to make sure nothing got into it.

Buckle Up

As word got around about what was happening at Sheridan Elementary, other schools got in touch to see if they could get help feeding their kids. After three years of volunteering, Rob took a leap of faith and founded Every Meal. It wasn’t exactly the best time to leave a good paying and comfortable corporate job. Rob and his wife had just had a baby. When you ask him why he did it, he explains that once he was aware of the problem of childhood hunger, not doing something about it wasn’t an option. Growing up, his parents modeled the importance of service to others. Rob says he was incredibly fortunate to have a spouse with a good job with benefits who supported him starting Every Meal. In 2013, the organization worked with 13 schools. In 2014, that number increased to 20, and it’s continued to grow ever since.

Every Meal Warehouse

Rob says if he could go back and tell his 2013 younger self one thing it would be to “buckle up.”  It was a steep learning curve starting a nonprofit. That first year, Every Meal had a two-year grant for $20,000 each year to cover operating expenses. The hope in those early days was to just stay afloat, which they managed to do because Rob wasn’t shy about asking for help and people were willing to give it. He readily admits that “they were building the plane while flying it.”  But he says they always did what they thought was best, and when they knew better, they did better. Today, Every Meal’s warehouse is filled with pallets stacked floor to ceiling with color-coded boxes of food. Each week, in a large room, volunteers sort and assemble food into color-coded meal bags that go to the schools to be distributed to kids.

The question that has guided Every Meal’s growth is “What best serves the kids?” This question has informed everything from the food they provide to how they treat employees. As Rob explained, as a nonprofit, Every Meal provides a level of compensation to support their employees and their families.  “We can’t control for household sizes and the expenses of our team,” Rob says. “But in general, we don’t want employees to have to rely on free-food programs to feed themselves and their families.”

Nutritious, Delicious and Relevant

Photo Credit: Every Meal

Every Meal provides nutritious food that meets current dietary standards. They also test-taste it to make sure it tastes good. Every Meal provides four meal bags that are culturally relevant meaning food is familiar and comforting to the families receiving it. Another meal bag provides food that is ready to eat, which is essential for families that don’t have access to a kitchen to cook and prepare food. In getting food to kids, Every Meal prioritizes discretion and dignity. They also don’t make assumptions about who needs food.

Every Meal purchases their food in bulk from reputable food vendors that they have vetted from all over the country. They have an operating budget of $7 million and approximately $3 million of it is spent on food. They could spend a lot less, if they opted to buy lower quality food. But that would go against their commitment to doing what is best for the kids.

The pandemic made their work even harder by increasing the cost of food, creating supply-chain issues and increasing the number of families facing food insecurity. But Every Meal made sure as many kids as they could had nutritious, delicious and relevant food to eat. Rob remembers signing letters for staff to have in their possession during the stay-at-home order stating they were essential workers and needed to work on site so kids could eat.

An Invisible Problem

In 2022, the Feeding Our Future scandal cast suspicion on every organization in Minnesota feeding kids to end childhood hunger, including Every Meal. As people fumed about taxpayers being defrauded, Rob wrote an op-ed for the Star Tribune reminding us all who the real victims were - the kids and families who didn’t get the meals that the stolen money was intended to feed. He also shared his recommendations on making informed donations to help people know how to research nonprofits so they can have more confidence that their donations are going to good use. Every Meal was referred to as “shady” by “uninformed members of the media” because they provide meals to kids on the weekend. The scandal cast doubt on the problem of childhood hunger.

Food insecurity is often an invisible problem. In Minnesota alone, there are 300,000 kids living with food insecurity. Every Meal has 142 schools on their waiting list, which means 2,500 kids are not getting enough to eat. Kids who are hungry have a hard time learning in school and often struggle with behavioral issues. Rob thinks a lot about the kid’s they’re not able to feed. He says it is a terrible myth that kids are hungry because their parents don’t care. Those parents just have fewer resources and are usually doing everything they can to care for their kids.

People often think that because they don’t see hungry kids, there isn’t a problem. But hungry kids and families don’t advertise the fact they are hungry and don’t have enough food. They often stay silent because of shame and because they’re overwhelmed by other challenges. So the way people find out that food insecurity is a problem in their community is because someone talks about it.

Making A Difference

Rob stays hopeful because he knows Every Meal is making a difference. He also is amazed that when people are asked to help, they do. A great example is what happened in May 2020 at Sanford Middle School after the murder of George Floyd. A request went out to donate enough food to help feed families in the area. They ended up getting enough food to fill 19 semi-trucks.

The signing of the Free School Meals for Kids Program was also a source of hope. Kids need to be fed if they are going to become the future workers and leaders our country needs to drive innovation and growth. Rob says his hope today is that by 2028, every school in Minnesota has access to a weekend food program. Every Meal is working hard and doing what best serves the kids to make that hope a reality.

Learn More

Visit Every Meal to learn how you can support their mission and vision by:

• Volunteering - they need volunteers to:

• Pack food at their Roseville headquarters

• Deliver food to schools

• Distribute food at schools

• Donating - Every Meal is funded by private foundations and individual donors. Please consider donating to support their work to end childhood hunger.