Last week CACFP Roundtable staff, board of directors, and UCLA interns converged upon California state legislators to educate them about the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP). There were about 15 of us who had 10 visits with our CA state legislators, the state legislators learned a lot!
We often say that it's important to educate elected officials about the food program because often-times they don't know much about it, if anything at all. They need to know about this critical program!
So, we educated them. We told them that the CACFP exists, what it is, the benefits of the program in the communities, as well as the challenges of CACFP. In particular, we emphasized the unfair and inequitable policy of the state meal reimbursement for family child care providers in California. Currently, family child care providers only receive 75% of the state meal reimbursement for historical and systemic policy problems. We distributed this fact sheet and many staffers and legislators acknowledged how unfair that practice was and expressed interest in fixing it - also noting the very tough budget year.
Personally, my favorite part was watching the lightbulbs go on about how critical this program is in the lives of their community members and while what we need changed won't happen tomorrow - being heard and understood was inspirational.
Let's keep on keeping on - it does make a difference!
A big thank you to our UCLA interns and our CACFP Roundtable Board members for making this day happen and furthermore make it a huge success.
Our next member meeting is in July! Register now here.
Comments