Like many places around the world, Lee County, Iowa, USA has children who suffer from undernutrition and malnutrition. School lunch programs help address hunger on weekdays, but can’t help during weekends. Together with other local organizations, we partnered with the local Salvation Army to package and distribute nutritious food, drinks, and snacks, to ensure children do not go hungry during the weekends too.

The funding for the Salvation Army’s "Weekend Food for Kids" program covers food but not the additional expenses that go with the program—for example, large totes to ensure the food is distributed efficiently and safely. The program's success also requires numerous volunteers.

Beginning in September 2019 and continuing throughout 2020, about 20 volunteers from our Fort Madison plant have donated part of a weekend every other month to help. They unloaded the food truck, unboxed and sorted the food to be packaged, filled bags with the required items, then loaded the bags into large totes — 30 of them donated by DuPont — for delivery to area schools.

The food bags are ultimately distributed among more than 200 children in kindergarten through eighth grade. Staff at each school discreetly hand out food bags to students who are part of the program, to avoid any potential labelling or assumptions that may be made about them. The Salvation Army is also working to ensure that young people have access to food during the summer months.