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Cleveland's child poverty rate remains among the highest across major U.S. cities, with one in every four children being considered food insecure — meaning they do not know where they will get a nutritious next meal, according to the Greater Cleveland Food Bank. One in seven people in the Greater Cleveland area are food insecure.
Public school students in Cleveland and Cleveland Heights recently finished a program with the MetroHealth System to improve access to healthy food in their neighborhoods.
Ideastream Public Media talked with students about their work to date and how it's affected their own lives.
First-hand experience
Maria Alvarez, a sophomore at Cleveland Heights High School, has first-hand experience with food insecurity.
“Both of my parents are Mexican immigrants. They came here to give us a better life. I was born here, but I struggled throughout the school year," she said. "I used to spend some nights without having a dinner on my table. I'd never eat breakfast and stuff, and it kind of like puts me in a place where I know how it feels to feel that hunger."
She decided to join MetroHealth's Youth Advisory Councils, which partner with local students to develop projects that address food insecurity and barriers to health in their communities. Alvarez said food insecurity is especially difficult for recent immigrants who lack documentation that would qualify them for food subsidies.
"It has significance because I know there's people out there just like me," she added. "I feel like opening this up to the community will not only make them feel welcome, but give them a chance to have food at home to feel more secure about themselves.”
Limited access
“A lot of the time [people are] not able to access healthy foods, get the produce that they need to be able to fully support themselves, so it definitely means a lot that I've been able to help," said Michael Hudson, also a sophomore at Cleveland Heights High School.
Hudson said he feels it's important for him to contribute as a Black teenager.
"I feel like a lot of people, especially people of color, don't get a lot of recognition in groups like this and are able to help their community,” Hudson said.
He wants to see the program expand beyond Cleveland Heights during his junior and senior years.
Richard Adams, a senior at Lincoln West High School in Cleveland, also wants to increase local access to fresh produce. Part of his contribution to the project was helping clean up the Refugee Garden in Cleveland’s Clark-Fulton neighborhood, which is managed by a private elementary school nearby. The garden provides fresh fruit and vegetables to the neighborhood’s recent immigrants.
"Food is getting expensive," Adams said. "People cannot afford to buy groceries, and so [the project is] really teaching us how to make the food by yourself. And you're saving money so you can put that towards bills or whatever you have to do.”
Being the change
Addie Hart and Dashara Turner were selected to present their work on food insecurity at this summer's School-Based Health Alliance’s Be the Change Youth Training Program Conference in Washington, D.C.
Turner, a senior at Cleveland Heights High School, said she noticed how many of her classmates struggled with food insecurity after pandemic resources expired.
"Past COVID, we didn't have the breakfast, lunch meals anymore and it was vital to a lot of the students here," Turner said. "I was thinking about the kids who are usually in the cafeteria and they go back in line for seconds and sometimes they get the snacks and put it in their bag to take home."
Hart, a Cleveland Heights sophomore, said the project is meaningful to her because she wants to help people who don't have the same privileges.
"This was important to me because my family did grow up with the access to food, but I was always knowing that there were families that did not have that access," she said.
