It’s a gorgeous day in late July at Burnham Park on Milwaukee’s south side.
Children swing on squeaky playground equipment and run gleefully through the park’s new splash pad.
Around 11:30 a.m., Catherine Ortiz pulls up to the park with her four children. The family lives nearby on 27th Street and they’ll come to this park almost every day for the rest of the summer.
The kids are here to play, but they’re also here for lunch.
Five days a week during summer, Hunger Task Force provides free meals for anyone who shows up at this park and at 170 other sites across Milwaukee.
Ortiz says the program is a lifeline.
"This helps me quite a bit. And even more so because my family does not receive FoodShare," she says in Spanish.
She's talking about federal SNAP benefits, which are called FoodShare in Wisconsin. Her family's income is just a little too high to receive the benefits. To qualify, a family of six needs to make less than $86,000 per year.
Although the family makes money, she said rising prices and finding food her four children under 10 years old all like has made grocery shopping more stressful. She moved to Wisconsin from Loíza, Puerto Rico ten years ago.
Summer is much more difficult for the family because her two sons, Yanxiel and Keriel don’t get the free meals they normally receive at school. Her daughters, Marielys and Karielys, are still too young to be in school.
"They eat three or four times each day," she says in Spanish of her growing boys. "And it's a lot easier when they're in school because the school offers breakfast and lunch."
And this is the reason that hunger and food insecurity spikes in the summer for children across the country.
When free meals are served at Milwaukee parks, 'there will always be a line'
To help fight that, Hunger Task Force uses federal dollars matched by private companies across Wisconsin to provide nearly half a million free meals in Milwaukee over the summer. The meals are delivered in vans to playgrounds, churches and school campuses every day.
The method for getting food to the families who need it has been dubbed “The Milwaukee Model,” and copied by cities around the country.
Willie Wilson is a staffer who has been serving meals for the Hunger Task Force at Burnham Park for five years. He sees the same families day after day. He says enough people know about the program to give him a warm welcome every day, no matter the weather.
“There will always be a line. They know. And trust me, they see that truck as soon as it comes, kids are coming," he says. "They’re leaving from everywhere. From behind the pavilion, from the soccer field, from the basketball courts, and they also come from the community over here.”
Wilson says he has loved seeing the same kids year over year and watching them grow. But he’s noticed that more families have been showing up for free meal distribution as costs have increased.
Families don’t need to apply or qualify for the program. They only need to show up and eat.
Removing barriers has been crucial to Hunger Task Force's success. Some food pantries in Milwaukee are limited by federal regulations to serving people who live in specific zip codes. To do that, families need to prove their residency in a certain place.
But there's a bigger, and squishier, piece to addressing hunger: Dealing with shame and stereotypes.
Justin Chu, the program manager on the Economic Opportunity and Financial Empowerment team at the National League of Cities, says that communities need to break down their misconceptions to fully serve the people who need help.
That means erasing the picture people have in their head of who goes hungry.
"People from all walks of life may need access to these services. So these could be children of working families. They can be children of multi-generational houses. They can be rural families. They can be urban families," he says. "Whatever it is, the children within those households need hunger assistance."
"By creating a stigma or myths around who is accessing these programs, only furthers to alienate and delegitimize these types of programs," he says.
Summer meal programs can fail due to lack of awareness, transportation
Across the country, researchers who look at summer meal programs say whether they work to address child hunger comes down to one thing: access.
If people don’t show up to get the meals, if the meal distribution sites are too far apart, meal times are too infrequent or no one knows about the program, it won’t make a difference.
Brandis Stockman and Justin Chu are with the National League of Cities, which tracks how member cities tackle big issues like infrastructure and hunger.
"A lot of really effective programs make sure that the locations where the food is being provided are very accessible for families," says Stockman.
"So whether that's along transportation lines, in city parks or city libraries where they know the kids are going to be during the summer, those are really accessible ways for families and for kids to get those food services," she adds.
But it's not always easy.
In Baltimore, a two-year research project found that just 32% of eligible households participated in summer meal programs provided by the public school district there.
The two biggest factors in non-participation were a lack of awareness of the program and transportation barriers for families trying to get to the central meal distribution sites.
Economic pressure means more families are turning to food assistance
Matt King, the CEO of Hunger Task Force here in Milwaukee, says the organization has papered the town with signs at each of the 170 meal distribution spots and used avenues like MKE Rec and Milwaukee Public Schools to spread the word.
Each summer, the program serves more free meals than the last. Since there isn’t a more direct way to measure child hunger, King says that the more meals they can serve, the better.
But he adds that Milwaukee has seen a serious uptick in families in need.
“In this economy, with rising costs at really every front, whether it's housing, whether it's gas, whether it's grocery," he says. "Families are really feeling that pressure of razor-thin budgets.”
For her part, mom Catherine Ortiz says she found out about the summer meal program for the first time last year on Facebook.
"This is the first time we've come to the park this year," she says. "But last year, we came here continuously."
Until the boys go back to school, Ortiz says it’ll be part of the family’s routine this summer, too.
