Leveraging a $20,000 “Feeding Our Future” grant from the Sodexo Foundation, the Sodexo account at UPS Headquarters and The Coca-Cola Company celebrated serving 13,000 free lunches to children of Atlanta.

Former U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young acknowledged volunteers for their efforts during a special barbeque held for city youth Wednesday, July 21st  at the Andrew and Walter Young Family YMCA. Sodexo’s Feeding Our Future program provides school children who rely on free and reduced-price meals during the academic year with nutritious lunches during the summer break.

Most people often believe that you have to be poor in order to go without food. But many working families in America still do not make enough to support their household. Which in cases, lead to children who may go hungry or not get enough food at home.

Every day, an estimated 17 million U.S. children rely on school breakfast and lunch programs as their only guaranteed meals. When schools shut down for the summer, federal meal programs feed only about three million, leaving 13 million children at risk for hunger.

To help bridge this gap, the Sodexo Foundation, the independent charitable organization of Sodexo, Inc., has provided free lunches to children through its summer feeding program, Feeding Our Future, since 1997. The Sodexo Foundation provides grants to local Sodexo accounts to purchase food for the meals and local Sodexo employees prepare the meals each day.

In addition to Atlanta, Feeding Our Future will be providing more than 300,000 summer lunches in 19 other cities in the United States including Boston, Buffalo, Camden, Chicago, Detroit, Honolulu, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and Washington, D.C.

Feeding Our Future is a program of the Sodexo Foundation, an independent charitable organization supporting hunger-related initiatives that focus on eliminating the root causes of hunger in the U.S. Sodexo pays all administrative costs of the Foundation to ensure that all money raised is directed to those in need.

A salute goes to Sodexo for taking initiative for the fight against hunger. As the saying goes, it takes a whole village to raise a child.

For more details, please visit www.helpstophunger.org