Fighting Childhood Summer Hunger with New Community Carts Campaign

For families and children facing hunger, summer can mean up to 90 days without school meals – and too often, that can mean worrying about where their next meal is coming from. The consequences of hunger can have lifelong effects – especially for children – making it more difficult for them to learn, play, and connect with other kids. Between childhood summer hunger, rising food costs, and the recent return of food assistance benefits to pre-pandemic levels, the demand from food banks is reaching a historic high. 

As we focus on expanding access to food, we’re putting our technology to work and doubling down on fighting childhood summer hunger. This month, we’re launching a new Community Carts push to drive donations to more than 100 Feeding America® partner food banks across the country, helping deliver relief to food insecure families as they prepare for the summer. 

Community Carts reimagine the traditional food drive, allowing anyone to easily donate the grocery items their local food banks have identified they need most, with items delivered directly to the food bank by Instacart shoppers. As part of this childhood summer hunger initiative, Instacart will continue to waive all service and delivery fees on every Community Carts donation. 

To start giving, customers can visit www.instacart.com/store/hub/community_carts. From there, they can select any participating food bank to support and shop as many items as they’d like from the food bank’s personalized wish list. Whether people donate just a few cans of food or a whole cart, donations will add up quickly as customers come together nationwide between now and the end of summer to contribute to Community Carts and support their neighbors in need.

More Ways We’re Fighting Childhood Hunger in the Communities We Serve

In addition to the Community Carts initiative, we’re also hard at work advocating for policies at the local, state, and federal levels to help address childhood hunger in the communities we serve:

• At the local level, we’re proud to be working closely with the Mayors Alliance to End Childhood Hunger and with mayors across the country to support initiatives that combat childhood hunger.
  
• At the state level, we have been advocating to expand or extend universal school meal programs, including in states such as Massachusetts, Oregon, and Washington. We’ve also been advocating to close the SNAP gap for families in states like California and New Jersey.
  
• At the federal level, we are advocating to protect SNAP funding, and we are working closely with the USDA and other stakeholders to advocate for much-needed reforms to the WIC program that would help ensure more infants and young children can access the nutritious food they need.

The Community Carts initiative, partnerships, and our policy advocacy are all part of Instacart Health, our latest initiative designed to expand food access, scale food-as-medicine programs, and promote better health in communities across the country. To learn more about Instacart Health, please visit www.instacart.com/company/health.

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Instacart is the leading grocery technology company in North America, partnering with more than 1,400 national, regional, and local retail banners to deliver from more than 80,000 stores across more than 14,000 cities in North America. To read more Instacart posts, you can browse the company blog or search by keyword using the search bar at the top of the page.