Project Narrative

I will be presenting the impacts of the summer meal program on Baldwin County, which

also known as Seamless Summer. I have been working with the Department of School Nutrition

for Baldwin County, and this department goes above and beyond to provide nutritional meals to

the students of the district. The department not only provides nutritious foods and fresh produce

to the kids, but they also do their part to offer healthier foods to the community. Hunger as

concerning issue for our generation, and many aspects circling around hunger continue to impact

the world we live in daily. Whether it’s in a country kilometers away or inside a home just a few

blocks down the street; hunger is real, and it is a growing issue. Hunger derives from multiple

factors, with the main one being food insecurities. Food insecurities can cause hunger,

malnutrition, disrupts in growth development and obesity, which has become a very prominent

issue in the United States. During the summer, rates of child hunger increase significantly. The

statistics go from 1 in every 6 children to 6 out of 7 children being hungry. In order to reduce

these rates, summer meal programs across the nation try to reach out to all kids with free meals;

however, only 15% of the children hungry participate and take advantage of these opportunities.

Seamless Summer is a government-funded summer meal program that feeds kids of the

age 18 and under throughout Baldwin County and surrounding areas free of charge. Adults are

also allowed to eat meals from the program with a $2-3.50 charge. The Baldwin County program

began in 2006 (that is a total of 13 years) with only Oak Hill Middle School as the main site.

Since then, several sites have been added to the program to help deliver food to children. The

first mobile route was established in May 2012, and the second mobile route was established in

June 2016. The summer meal program has many opportunities to offer to the youth when it

comes to nutrition. However, I realized I needed to look at program in more depth. I took an
interest in the meal program and the effects it has on the community. I wanted to create a map

presenting a visual on the different communities within the area and why these areas needed to

be helped. I wanted to present the data of the Seamless Summer Meal Program with the use of

geographic information systems. I collected all the numbers from the amounts of meals prepared,

served and wasted, and I input all the information to display on the map of Baldwin County

using the online Arc geographic system. I believe that this project was needed because having a

visual of numbers displayed on a format where you can see precise locations could help a

program realize what areas to expand the service of meals. A list of locations won’t have the

same impact when looking at a map and actually seeing the locations dispersed throughout the

area. The visual will help the School Nutrition Department to provide ideas on where to expand

and will help them with tracking numbers. Keeping track of numbers and locations for the

summer meal program will create expansion for the program and will also reduce the amount of

waste for future projections.

It was somewhat challenging trying to collect all the numbers from the sites due to simple

miscalculations. It was so important to always go back and check the work of other site

supervisors to ensure that they filled out the forms correctly. Overall, I think that the GIS

program system is beneficial to the department. While conducting this project, I realized that

some sites were not serving as many meals as projected. I decided to conduct a survey to

represent the percentages of satisfaction and disapproval ratings of the meals served at that site.

With this data, I was able to develop summarized data from surveys completed by the students.

The surveys could also help with promoting the school meal service and reducing food

waste. Also, the use of these surveys could really help provide an insight to what kids want and

what meals to serve more often.

 There are some things that I would have done differently. Such as with the GIS program,

I wish I was more experienced with the software because I believe I could’ve added more layers

of information. It was my first time using the software, but I knew that I really wanted to do this

project and that it would be very helpful to the department. Also with conducting the surveys, I

probably should have added an incentive for the students to receive when completing the

surveys. I realized that I would’ve had more participants to complete surveys if I would’ve been

giving out some type of prize or item. I was still satisfied with the amount of people that

participated however I knew he probably could’ve been more. I am still proud of this project, and

I hope to continue to work representing numbers to displays different aspects of health.