Goal: Supplement government funded mid-day meal program to eliminate child hunger, and achieve food security and improved nutrition for the city’s public school students.
Scalable models and accelerated impact resulting from public-private partnerships in local communities and inspired leaders are required to achieve this goal. This event will highlight the launch of an unmatched partnership between two of the world’s most successful NGOs providing free mid-day meals to children in government-funded schools. Share Our Strength, a US-based national NGO facilitating school meals to hungry kids in the US and abroad, and Akshaya Patra, the world’s largest school meals provider, have partnered in India to accelerate the impact in the effort to serve hot, fresh, nutritious meals to 3 million children everyday by 2025. They launched the program in November 2022 in New Delhi, and have picked Nagpur as the first place in India to implement their joint effort on Sunday, February 26, 2023.Together, their work aligned with the government’s mid-day meal program will help eliminate classroom hunger, increase attendance and enrolment in schools, and address malnutrition.
Share Our Strength has partnered with more than a thousand partners in the US and abroad over nearly 40 years, raised >$1Billion, funded >2Billion meals and currently works in India with The Breakfast Revolution and Dr. Prakash Amte’s Lok Biradari Prakalpa besides The Akshaya Patra Foundation. Share Our Strength is partner-agnostic and plans to expand its partner-NGO network in India to include several others in the next few years to help build a national awareness campaign. Akshaya Patra currently serves nearly 2 million school meals in India every day, and aspires to expand its reach to add another million kids partly aided by strategic partnership with Share Our Strength. Beginning with the Nagpur event on Sunday – February 26, 2023, the two organizations plan to host a series of awareness building and fundraising events in many cities across India to include food, music, drama, and celebrities such as master chefs, famous athletes, artists, musicians, sports stars, physicians and nutritionists from India and USA. 100% of funds raised will go to the program partner NGOs in India. This particular event aims to help fund Akshaya Patra build a brand-new kitchen for its Nagpur operation to serve meals to15,000 public school kids.
Often, children can be the most vulnerable segment of the society, being unable to advocate for themselves. Share Our Strength and Akshaya Patra believe that hunger, especially child hunger is a solvable problem by connecting people who care with solutions that work to feed hungry kids. Creating awareness and contributing funds are tangible ways in which the needle can move on this effort. Those present at the event will include leadership team members from both organizations, popular chefsSanjeev Kapoor and Vishnu Manoharand other celebrities. Live music will accompany great food from the city’s top brands. While visitors enjoy the memorable experience, their contribution will pay for one child’s school meal for an entire year which will be matched by Share Our Strength to double the impact of the funds raised (i.e. another child’s meal secured). And the learning from the event might impress upon the minds of participants that everybody has a strength to share, especially in securing the nation’s future wealth – good nutrition and education for its kids of today!
The Nagpur chapter is chaired by Sameer Bendre of Persistent Systems and co-chaired by Chef Vishnu Manohar and Jeetu Nayak.More information may be found at:
www.shareourstrength.in about this event
www.shareourstrength.org about Share Our Strength
www.akshayapatra.org about Akshaya Patra
For questions, you may contact Jeetendra Jodhpurkar at [email protected] or Chandamita Das at [email protected]
