Introduction
The applicant’s mission is to provide children and teenagers in Macomb County, Michigan, with more accessible food services. The applicant cooperates with the National Council of Negro Women Macomb County Section which deals with improving the quality of life for women and their families. The applicant serves 1,000 children per year. Primary contacts for the specific application and the organization.
Cover Letter
The organization’s legal name is MEALS WITH LOVE. The requested amount is $60,000. The grant aims to ensure that disadvantaged children and teenagers in Macomb County, Michigan, have adequate access to food irrespective of their families’ economic states. The support is requested for two years.
Project Information
The given project title is The Community Mobile Food Truck to Serve Disadvantaged Children’s Needs in Macomb County, Michigan. Grant support of $60,000 is requested to implement the project. Since the support is asked for two years, the proposed start and end dates are December 2020 and December 2022, correspondingly. The project summary relates to using a community mobile food truck to distribute nutritional food to low-income children and adolescents in the given community.
The project is going to address an urgent problem in the selected community. It refers to the fact that hunger is widespread in Michigan, causing multiple health issues. In particular, the state statistics show that 318,960 children regularly experience hunger in Michigan (Feeding America, 2020, para. 1). Thus, the project’s target population is children 5-17 years old. It is also necessary to note that the truck will offer subsidized meals of $5 to anyone older than 17.
Since the problem of hunger is acute in Michigan, the state officials make some efforts to address it. For example, they ensure that school meals are free of charge or cheap for food-insecure children. However, statistical data demonstrate that such programs only cover 70% of disadvantaged children (Feeding America, 2018, para. 2). Furthermore, school lunches are not adequate during summer, meaning that the existing initiatives are insufficient to address the problem (Borders, Ferris, Beeby, & McCahill, 2018). Thus, the given proposal is a new project that tries to improve the state’s response to the current challenge.
The project focuses on achieving a specific and realistic goal. The target is to decrease the number of children with insufficient access to food to 10% of all disadvantaged children in Michigan. A particular strategy is required to achieve the objective, and Borders et al. (2018) stipulate that creating multiple opportunities for children to access nutritional food is a suitable option. It is possible to expect these positive outcomes a year after starting the project implementation.
The project will be evaluated based on the number of Michigan children and teenagers who keep experiencing hunger regularly irrespective of the project realization. A research instrument of a questionnaire is suitable to perform the evaluation. As has been mentioned, the proposed project plans to serve the citizens of Macomb County, Michigan. That is why it will not be complicated to evaluate the project’s effectiveness because the given county has a limited number of educational establishments. In a 1-year term, it will be necessary to provide these institutions with questionnaires to identify how many children and teenagers will suffer from insufficient access to food. The project will be considered successful if the calculation shows that 10% of children only suffer from hunger.
A few partners are necessary to implement the grant and achieve positive outcomes. Central partnerships include All Colors of the Rainbow and non-profit food organizations that operate in Michigan. In addition to that, it is necessary to mention the National Council of Negro Women Macomb County Section (n.d.) since this organization addresses the quality of life of women and their families. It means that the problem of children’s hunger is within its scope of interest. Cooperation with these establishments is necessary to improve the community’s knowledge about the problem and can provide the issue with assistance, including financial resources and volunteers.
References
Borders, S., Ferris, B., Beeby, M. J., & McCahill, P. (2018). West Michigan food insecurity: Using cluster analysis and geographic information systems to identify needs. Progress in Community Health Partnerships: Research, Education, and Action, 12(2), 187-197.
Feeding America. (2018). Child hunger & poverty in Michigan: Map the meal gap. Web.
Feeding America. (2020). Hunger in Michigan. Web.
National Council of Negro Women Macomb County Section. (n.d.). Membership. Web.