Free lunch helps ease budget crunch
LOMBARD | Summer program has midday meal for kids covered
Thirty-eight year-old Elizabeth Castro is finding it hard to make ends meet in the face of higher gas and food prices.
The Villa Park resident has turned to a summer program to help relieve some of the strain on her home food budget.
(Sun-Times)
Castro, the mother of an 11-year-old daughter and five-year-old son, takes her children to York Community Resource Center in Lombard, where there are books to read, math and spelling exercises to master, computer games to play and free lunch.
“Food is very expensive at this time,” said Castro, who sells shoes at a department store in Downers Grove and whose husband, Silvano Castro, does maintenance at a hotel in Oakbrook Terrace. “Everything is going up, except pay.”
Castro used to spend $90 a week on food. She now spends $160 “for the same food,” she said.
The free lunch her kids get at the center means the food she has at home “we’ll keep for other days,” she said.
“That helps so much. Because I don’t spend money (on lunch), I have money for breakfast food at home.”
She’s not alone, said Mariela Soejarto, community director for the center, which serves 55 kids from kindergarten through high school in the summer program. The free lunches, which the center gets from the Northern Illinois Food Bank, are very important, Soejarto stressed.
“You cannot believe how important,” she said. “Some of the kids they come and the lunch that we give to them, that’s breakfast and lunch because they have nothing to eat in the morning. The economy is so tough that you need these kinds of programs.”
The Northern Illinois Food Bank, which serves 13 counties in Illinois, is providing summer lunches for an average 2,679 kids per day this month at 47 sites, an increase of 26 percent over July last year, said Dennis Smith, executive director of the food bank. The lunches go to children who are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches, he said. The food bank expects to serve close to 90,000 kids’ lunches this summer, up from 76,000 last summer, he said, attributing the increased demand to higher unemployment, and food and fuel costs.
The higher prices have prompted the Castro family to make changes, including cutting back on food, clothes and driving. Silvano Castro no longer drives to work, Elizabeth Castro said as she dropped her son off at the resource center, housed in the York Center Church of the Brethren. Silvano walks or rides his bike to work now, she said.
The family also cut out taking the kids to a favorite park in Lombard.
“We’re not able to do that any more because of the cost of the gas,” she said. “We’re not going to too many places.”
She said she’s thankful that by participating in the summer program at the center, her children also can participate in free field trips, including trips to the DuPage County Fair and Brookfield Zoo.