Hole Food Rescue seeks $50k town/county help for summer kids’ lunches

Hole Food Rescue is requesting $50,000 total in FY2027 Health & Human Services funding — $25,000 from Teton County and $25,000 from the Town of Jackson — to support its Sprout Summer Lunch Program, according to its application attachment. The organization says the 2026 summer program budget totals $129,000, with the public dollars aimed at covering staffing, food, supplies, and vehicle costs. Source: Hole Food Rescue Funding Request Attachment.

The program provides free lunches to all kids every weekday for 11 weeks, delivered through camp drop-offs (including One22 YES scholarship camps), neighborhood “Sprout Stands,” and a mobile van that visits multiple locations weekly. Hole Food Rescue reports that in summer 2025 it distributed 9,067 lunches, with 47% delivered to scholarship campers, and that since 2020 the program has distributed more than 47,000 lunches.

From a taxpayer standpoint, the application is better than most at at least naming measurable outputs — lunches distributed, number of sites, “children reached per site,” and a local-sourcing target — but it still leans heavily on feel-good outcomes (“improved focus and energy”) that are hard to verify without an external benchmark. If town and county officials fund the request, they should lock in a simple, auditable reporting requirement: cost per lunch, unique children served (not just meals), and what portion of the $129,000 is truly incremental versus in-kind donations and volunteer labor.