The Pella Community Food Shelf was selected as a host site for the new Healthy Kids Iowa Pilot Program, which is a collaboration with the State of Iowa and the Food Bank of Iowa.

This new program allows families that meet the program’s income based eligibility criteria with children ages 4-18 years old to visit the Pella Community Food Shelf for expanded access to fresh and nutritious foods. Healthy Kids Iowa, which has no cost to participate, replaces the Summer EBT program that was in place last year. Pella Community Food Shelf Executive Director Melissa Zula says that families can get food for each child in the household, and that the program will provide high quality and healthy foods for all families.

“If you have one child in your household, you’re going to come on through and you’re going to collect for that one child for the whole month. If you have multiple kids in your household, you can choose. So, if you want to in one stop gather for your whole month for all of your kids, you can do that, or you can come back and visit us every single week [for the amount of kids in your household] and gather that food. So, we will explain all of this to you as you come on through, but it is really going to serve as a wonderful project to get really good healthy produce, whole grains, a lot of proteins, and dairy. So, it has a lot of really great food that I think would be a blessing to any of us.”

The Pella Community Food Shelf will hold the distribution for Healthy Kids Iowa every Tuesday throughout the summer from 3-6 pm. Find eligibility information for the program here. Learn more about Healthy Kids Iowa from Melissa Zula on today’s Let’s Talk Pella.