Our Story.
Summerlunch+ was founded by Susan Wright in 2015 to fill the summertime gap when school meal programs and learning are on break. Susan’s work in school nutrition demonstrated the need for nutritious lunches and food literacy programming during this time and saw an opportunity for kids to return to school with both full bellies and minds.
Having previously worked in the Thorncliffe community, she recognized this was a priority area to pilot the first summerlunch+ session in 2016. The program was run in partnership with The Neighbourhood Organization’s summer camp providing healthy meals, food education and hands-on learning to 400 campers each day. The summerlunch+ program was well received and by 2019, had grown to seven sites across Toronto, reaching 1,000 kids each day with a team of 40 amazing summer staff.
In 2020, we were faced with the biggest challenge yet; students were at home for several months missing their school food programs, food security soared, and summer camps were canceled. It was clear that learning loss and food insecurity had become a year-round problem among school-aged children and so we took time to retool and reimagine a new way to reach kids. Our new phase, summerlunch+ at Home, designed by Registered Dietitians, Joeie Schwartz and Cassie Chan, allowed us to increase our engagement, reach and impact.
Since our redesign, we learned that families benefit from at home cooking in more ways than we could have imagined. Everyone in the home cooks, learns and eats together, facilitating long-term healthy habits! We have since worked with amazing partners, established and new, and have extended our programming beyond the summer months. We have strengthened our program through dietitian leadership and academic partnerships with Toronto Metropolitan University and the Dalla Lana School of Public Health to facilitate research and evaluation.
We strive to continually improve our programming, partnerships, and learning to expand our reach and grow great kids. Thank you to everyone who has supported summerlunch+ in one way or another. We are so excited for what’s in store!