Providing Meals in Early Childhood Settings

Thousands of young children in Vermont spend much of their day in early childhood education programs (often called child care), eating 2-3 meals and snacks while there. How food is served in early childhood programs is different across the state. Many providers struggle to provide food, even though they would like to do so. Not all early childhood programs are eligible to use the federal Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) that provides some federal funding to cover the cost of food. As of March 2022, less than 40% of early childhood programs in Vermont were utilizing this program.

Some providers use CACFP to serve all the meals and snacks needed during the day, some are providing some or all without federal funding support, and some require families to pack in all the food their child needs for the day. Reliable access to nutritious food is critical at this age for health and brain development. And, in a time when hunger is on the rise and families with children are over five times more likely to be facing hunger, building more equitable access to food in child care is crucial. 

To find out what the barriers early childhood providers are facing when it comes to providing food, and how we might overcome them as a state, Hunger Free Vermont, in partnership with other partner early childhood organizations, conducted a statewide survey of early childhood programs in late 2021. We wanted to hear from early childhood programs about the cost of operating a meal program in early childhood settings. We also wanted to learn more about the barriers that early childhood programs face to providing meals in early childhood settings. This report contains a summary of our findings, recommendations for how to support more early childhood programs in serving meals and snacks, and an appendix that includes all of the qualitative and quantitative feedback we recorded through these conversations. 

The Providing Meals in Early Childhood Settings report findings will be used to advance early childhood nutrition advocacy initiatives and to expand nutrition programming in early childhood settings in coming years. Specific initiatives that this report can support include:

• Informing statewide child care financing reform to include nutrition program funding support

• Helping to emphasize the importance of early childhood legislation support as we communicate with state legislators

• Adapting the technical assistance and program support that technical assistance organizations such as Hunger Free Vermont provide

• Inspiring future follow-up studies and data collection to further advance the ability for all children to have access to nutrition in early childhood settings

• Outlining new grant programs that can impact early childhood programs’ ability to expand upon current nutrition programming or to access nutrition programming for the first time

The Vermont Farm to Early Childhood Coalition worked with Child Care Aware of America to develop a tool that maps Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) participation in Vermont. This interactive story map allows users to layer different statewide data points related to food access and child opportunity index within the maps to view a regional data story.

If you are interested in learning more about the Providing Meals in Early Childhood Settings report or the CACFP Mapping tool, you can view the webinar recording presented on November 18th by Keely Agan of Hunger Free Vermont and Cynthia Greene of Shelburne Farms.