FRAC honors Hassink, New Yorkers after releasing summer food report
June 16, 2015 |12:12 AM
Food Research & Action Center President Jim Weill, left, and former Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman, chair of FRAC board, present the group’s distinguished service award to American Academy of Pediatrics President Sandra Hassink at FRAC's annual benefit dinner at the Capital Hilton Hotel on Wednesday. (Jerry Hagstrom/The Hagstrom Report)
The Food Research & Action Center last week presented its distinguished service award to American Academy of Pediatrics President Sandra Hassink and honored two New York anti-hunger leaders a short time after releasing its report on kids' summer food needs.
Hassink, who recently testified before the Senate Agriculture Committee at a hearing on reauthorization of child nutrition programs, has focused her career on preventing and treating obesity in children.
She is a pediatrician at Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington, Del., where she founded the weight management program in 1988. She is co-principal investigator for the Healthy Active Living for Families project, which promotes active healthy living for parents and families of young children.
FRAC, an anti-hunger advocacy organization, also presented its award for innovative anti-hunger work to Margaret Purvis, the president and CEO of the Food Bank for New York City, and Daniel Tietz, the chief special services officer for the New York City Human Resources Administration.
Purvis and Tietz accepted the award on behalf of the New York City SNAP Task Force, which identifies problems in the administration of the SNAP program. To address client needs identified by the task force, the Food Bank for New York City and the Human Resources Administration jointly developed a mediation model that FRAC says “cuts through red tape and system glitches to improve SNAP customer service and adminstrative efficiency.
The model allows outreach workers to identify problems and work with identified liaisons within local HRA offices.
The awards were presented on Wednesday.
On June 1, FRAC released a report called “Hunger Doesn’t Take a Vacation,” which said 3.1 million children participated in summer feeding programs last July, an increase of more than 215,000 children or 7 percent increase over July 2013.
The report measures participation in the Summer Nutrition Programs by comparing the number of children receiving summer meals to the number of children receiving school lunch during the regular school year.
The regular school year is used as a measure because such a high proportion of low-income children eat school lunch on regular school days. FRAC measures national summer participation during the month of July, when typically all children are out of school throughout the month and lose access to regular year school meals.
FRAC President Jim Weill said in a news release that while the increase in participation is encouraging, the needs of all children are not being met and he encouraged Congress to improve the program during reauthorization of child nutrition programs, which is scheduled for this year.
