‘Share Our Strength’ and ‘Akshaya Patra’ are working together to build a kitchen in Nagpur that will serve hot, fresh, nutritious mid-day meals to approximately 15,000 school children.
The goal is to expand the mid-day meal programme and increase access to nutritious food for public school students in the region. Scalable models and accelerated impact from public-private partnerships in local communities, as well as inspired leaders, are required to achieve the stated goal. This event will mark the beginning of an unprecedented collaboration between two of the world’s most successful NGOs in providing free, nutritious midday meals to children in government-funded schools.
Share Our Strength is a national NGO based in the United States that provides school meals to hungry children in the United States and around the world. Its primary goal is to eliminate childhood hunger by increasing access to school meals. And Akshaya Patra is the world’s largest provider of school meals.
In India, these two organisations have collaborated to increase the impact of the effort to serve hot, fresh, nutritious meals to 3 million children every day by 2025. They launched the programme in November 2022 in New Delhi and have chosen Nagpur as the first location in India to put it into action on February 26, 2023. Their work, in collaboration with the government’s mid-day meal programme, will help eliminate classroom hunger, increase school attendance and enrolment, and alleviate malnutrition.
Over nearly 40 years, Share Our Strength has collaborated with over a thousand partners in the United States and abroad, raised hundreds of millions of dollars, funded over 2 billion meals, and has spent the last five years working in India with multiple implementation partners, including The Akshaya Patra Foundation. Share Our Strength is partner-agnostic and plans to expand its partner-NGO network in India to include several others in the coming years to aid in the development of a national awareness campaign. Akshaya Patra currently serves nearly 2 million school meals per day in India and aspires to expand its reach to include another million children, which will be aided in part by a strategic partnership with Share Our Strength in India and the United States.
Beginning with the Nagpur event on February 26, 2023, the two organisations intend to host a series of awareness-raising and fundraising events in cities across India. All funds raised in India will go to partner NGOs in the country. This particular event is intended to help fund
Akshaya Patra constructed a new kitchen for its Nagpur operation to serve meals to 15,000 public school children. Members of organisations’ leadership teams, as well as popular chefs Sanjeev Kapoor and Vishnu Manohar and other celebrities, will attend the event.
Live music from Zero movie playback singer Abhay Jodhpurkar will accompany great food from the city’s top brands. While visitors enjoy the memorable experience, each person’s contribution will pay for one child’s school meal for an entire year, and the funds raised will be matched by Share Our Strength, doubling the impact. And the learning from the event might impress upon the minds of participants that everybody has a strength to share, especially in securing the nation’s future wealth – good nutrition and education for its kids, today.
