Challenge:
In 2022, Colorado voters approved the statewide Healthy School Meals for All ballot issue. The measure was designed to ensure that all public-school students have access to no-cost nutritious meals during the school day, regardless of their family’s income.
By making the meals available to all students, not just those whose family incomes qualify them for free or reduced-price breakfast and lunch, the measure reduces stigma while creating community around mealtime at school.
While enacting this measure was a huge step, the challenge remained to expand awareness of this new option and reintroduce today’s healthy school meals to parents who may have memories of the less tasty and nutritious options (mystery meat anyone?).
Approach:
The Colorado Blueprint to End Hunger chose SE2 to design and implement an educational and engagement campaign to enhance awareness of the new program and encourage broad family participation.
The bilingual, culturally relevant paid media included compelling digital and broadcast TV ads that reached across the state.
We also administered a community engagement program, providing support to 40 local grantees for their outreach initiatives in the communities they knew best.
During the 2023-2024 school year, every eligible school district in Colorado opted into the program. Breakfast and lunch meal participation was up 37% and 30% respectively statewide compared to prior years, and approximately 184,000 breakfasts and 435,000 lunches were served daily August 2023 through February 2024.
Participation in the new program was so strong that a new challenge emerged: ensuring that families still completed the eligibility forms that school districts use to leverage federal funds and qualify families for other benefits.
The grantees pivoted to highlight the importance of these forms and to help families complete them. This aligned with SE2’s related engagement with the Colorado Department of Education to help districts streamline and promote completing the forms.
Results:
Paid media efforts reached Coloradans online and on broadcast TV and streaming services in English and Spanish. Thanks to the outreach, GoodFoodFuelsGreatMinds.org, which offered information on the program, attracted 206,000 unique visitors for a total of 270,000 web sessions. A quarter of the traffic went to the Spanish-language version of the site.
The grantees hosted over 250 events reaching more than 100,000 families.
One grantee reported: “I had families coming up to me on a daily basis expressing how much relief this provided for their families how those extra five dollars a day (not) spent on meal costs, gave them that much more breathing room for meeting their day-to-day budgets; how that extra little bit of time spent not packing lunch made a world of difference; how being ‘just like everybody else’ and not having to wait for the free and reduced line helped kids feel included.”
