Feed The Children, Inc.

We fight food insecurity by making nutritious foods more accessible to families with limited resources & helping families learn why and how to eat healthier foods. We also meet immediate needs by partnering with other non-profit organizations to provide food & essentials in low-income communities throughout the U.S. Internationally, we work to transform lives by improving the food & nutrition security of mothers & children, and more specifically, to reduce malnutrition. Through our work, we hope that: 1) All children will be properly nourished & developed by age 5 and continue to understand the importance of nutrition throughout their life; 2) All children will have access to safe & clean water, proper sanitation, & adequate hygiene resources that promote healthy immune systems & enable them to develop through adolescence & into adulthood; 3) All children will be able to enroll, feel safe, & complete a high-quality education that promotes lifelong learning; & 4) Families will be self-reliant, financially stable, & able to support & strengthen their communities. We are expanding our capacity building activities internationally to ensure that families & entire communities are empowered to provide for the well-being of their children. One way this is done is through Care Groups, an approach to peer-to-peer training of mothers in nutrition and health. Studies show that the Care Group strategy consistently outperforms other methods in reducing child deaths and malnutrition across an entire community at very low cost. We plan to continue to expand this model in our program areas and to partner with other organizations to scale it up. Another means of supporting community resilience is through village savings and loan groups, self-managed groups of women who save money together and take small loans from those savings to support income-generating activities. This provides a source of income for families and promotes sustainability at the household level.

We believe that we need to collaborate with others working to defeat hunger, especially to promote strategies that we know will help children survive and thrive. Feed the Children program staff members - both in our country programs and in our headquarters teams - have supported dozens of organizations in using effective strategies around the world, along with on-going training of our own Feed the Children staff. We are always looking for improved strategies to help children survive and thrive. We hold the following values for our programmatic work:• Whole Community,• Needs-based,• Evidence-based,• Child-focused,• Measurable impact,• Partnerships, and• Long-term sustainable impact. Feed the Children's development teams seek relationships with foundations, corporations, and individuals that share a passion for serving children, their families, and their communities around the world. Feed the Children has worked side-by-side to create long-standing, mutually beneficial partnerships for many years. One of Feed the Children's core values, championing partnerships, means that developing relationships with local communities and governments, as well as private and public donors, is crucial to this work. Feed the Children strategically engages relevant government departments, key stakeholders, and opinion leaders of the community to discuss the true need of the community and a plan for action. The activities introduced are therefore appropriate, involve community members as stakeholders, and can be maintained by the community. Internationally, Feed the Children's program activities combine meeting immediate nutritional, health, and educational needs of children with promoting positive, long-term behavioral change to children and their caregivers, particularly mothers. As part of our strategy, Feed the Children is increasingly conducting formative research (e.g., barrier analysis and positive deviant studies) in order to better understand the barriers and enablers of effective change in the communities in which we work. We also seek to identify the uncommon – but successful – behaviors and strategies that enable some poor families to find better solutions to a problem than their peers.

For fiscal year 2020, Feed the Children's resources included cash contributions and grants, gifts-in-kind, and other revenues totaling $470 million. Taking into account all of our U.S. and international offices, we employ 552 staff globally. More than 500 corporate partners provide food and other essential products. We take a holistic development approach to address the fundamental challenges that children and families around the world face in their effort towards becoming food secure. Feed the Children's four thematic areas of focus prioritize vulnerable and at-risk children and enable us to cultivate the social, economic, cultural, and environmental conditions needed for families to thrive. Feed the Children has a proven track record of developing relationships and mobilizing key stakeholders, opinion leaders, governments, peer organizations, and corporate partners to develop appropriate plans of action and ensure efficient and equitable distribution of food and resources that mitigate common challenges for families facing poverty. Our dedicated logistics and inventory management team connects partners with our programs by overseeing all domestic and international shipments even through the most challenging of routes. In the United States, we operate five regional distribution centers which collect and ship food and essentials to partners. FTC Transportation, our trucking division, uses their fleet of 30 semi-trucks to ship food and necessities. In FY 2020, we delivered 79.2 million pounds of food, essential items, and educational supplies domestically to our network of local food pantries, agencies and houses of worship across the U.S. who then distributed these items to people in need. We operate five “Teacher Store" locations around the country where teachers in Title I schools can come and receive free supplies for their classrooms. We also work closely with key partners to run our Summer Feeding Program in Oklahoma and New York. Internationally, we use a child-focused community development (CFCD) approach emphasizing four key program pillars to transform lives by improving the food and nutrition security of mothers and children. Funding comes primarily from U.S.-based individuals, churches, and corporate donors and grants. Internationally, Feed the Children employs more than 300 experienced professionals who have a diverse set of skills and expertise that ensure the effective implementation of our international development programs around the world.

ACROSS THE U.S. In fiscal year 2020, through our network of more than 800 active community partners, Feed the Children distributed 79.2 million pounds of food and essentials. Through this network, our collective outreach benefited 5.6 million people in the U.S. In fiscal year 2020, Feed the Children operated five Teacher Store locations — in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; Elkhart, Indiana; La Vergne, Tennessee; Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; and Ontario, California. Each offered free school supplies to educators in Title I schools (schools with high numbers/percentages of children from low income families). We gave away more than $3.7 million in teaching materials as well as books valued at $7 million, benefiting students in 355 school districts. ACROSS THE WORLD Internationally, we have made progress in the following areas: Through Tiwalere I and Tiwalere II, two 5-year projects in Malawi awarded by USAID through the generous support of the American people, we have improved early childhood development and nutrition programs by strengthening community-based child care centers and have reached pregnant women and mothers of children under the age of 2 years with key nutrition and health messages using the Care Group model. Under the second 5-year award for Tiwalere II, we are continuing our existing programs and will expand by adding additional communities and providing health training to adolescent girls. We have established village savings and loan (VSL) groups in the Philippines, Malawi, Kenya, and Tanzania. These groups promote individual access to local capital and enable members to begin income-generating activities of their own. These groups are being developed in Honduras and El Salvador, with the goal of spreading this methodology to all our country programs. In all 8 countries where we work internationally, we have provided nutritious meals every day to school-aged children, and have also provided school supplies and deworming medicines. We have trained staff members in Malawi, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and the Philippines in the Care Group model. However, we are still working on implementing Care Groups in Tanzania and Uganda. We have plans to train staff members in our Central America program countries (El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras) in the Care Group model in the future.