About End 68 Hours of Hunger
What is End 68?
End 68 Hours of Hunger is a private, non-profit organization providing support to food-insecure students during the 68 hours from Friday afternoon through Monday morning. Students in need are provided with a weekly bag of food throughout the school year. Each bag of nonperishable items packed for food insecure children includes three dinners, two lunches, two snacks and two breakfasts.
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These meals total approx. 4,000 calories and are rich in protein. Staying below a reasonable weight so children can put it into their backpacks, each bag of food usually stays between $9-$11 in cost.
Why it's important
Food Insecurity is defined as limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods or limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways. Children who grow up in food insecure households often lag behind their food-secure peers in terms of cognitive, emotional, and physical development.
Food-insecure students are often not fully engaged in daily activities such as social interactions with peers at school. They also have greater difficulty getting along with other students. Hungry children have more social and behavioral problems because they feel bad, have less energy for complex social interactions, and cannot adapt as effectively to environmental stresses. A student suffering from ongoing food insecurity can lag behind classmates in reading abilities, which can compound as the student continues to move through their secondary education years.
Our beginning
The program came to Farmington in 2016, while then-Principal, Jessica Richardson, began her first school year working at the Henry Wilson Memorial School. She learned about the impact End 68 Hours of Hunger makes with food-insecure students when she was previously involved in the Northwood, NH program as a teacher. Richardson saw a need for this type of support within the HWMS student population. Mentored by the Portsmouth, NH coordinators, the Farmington coordinators have expanded the program to the entire school district, one home-school family and the Head Start Center in Farmington in September 2017. The program currently supports nearly 50 students in the Farmington community.