FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 10 Cents a Meal Application Deadline REOPENED for 2021-22 School Year! The Michigan Department of Education (MDE) has announced that the application window will be reopened for 10 Cents A Meal for Michigan's Kids & Farms, the state-funded grant providing matching incentive funding up to 10 cents per meal to purchase and serve Michigan-grown fruits, vegetables, and legumes. Continue reading

By Miranda Dunlap, Brooke Miller, and Jordan Morgan. First appeared on Spartan Newsroom, republished with permission. Holt Public Schools Food Service Director Evan Robertson discusses Michigan’s 10 Cents a Meal program and how it has affected students in the district and surrounding community. Miranda Dunlap and Brooke Miller/Spartan Newsroom Schools in Greater Lansing are benefiting from fresh produce in their lunchrooms thanks to a Michigan program aiming to get farm-fresh food onto lunch tables. The 10 Cents a Meal program, administered by the Michigan Department of Education, gives schools 10 cents for every meal they serve to children that includes a local fruit, vegetable or dried bean. This funding aims to make it easier for schools to afford fresh and local foods. “We’ve been doing some different things like squash and root vegetables, which a lot of kids have never seen or had,” said Evan Robertson, director of food services at Holt Public Schools, which got involved with 10 Cents a Meal in 2020. “It’s kind of cool that we’re able to try to introduce them to other kinds of food that they don’t have at home.” Robertson said children get excited to have different fruits with their lunches. He said that seeing them get excited over something so simple makes the program worth it. “A really big winner is the students here,” he said. “It’s common to hear kids say that school is the only place they have access to certain fruits.” Continue reading

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE LANSING, MI (Nov 23, 2021) - Michigan students and young children were were introduced to up to 32 new types of vegetables and 14 new types of fruit during the last school year thanks to the state’s expanded 10 Cents a Meal for Michigan’s Kids & Farms (10 Cents a Meal) program, according to the annual legislative report recently published by the Michigan Department of Education (MDE). Continue reading

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE LANSING, Mich. (Sept. 30, 2021) - The Michigan Department of Education (MDE) has announced 229 grantees for the initial round of 10 Cents A Meal for Michigan's Kids & Farms grants for the 2021-22 school year. The state-funded farm-to-institution program provides matching incentive funding up to 10 cents per meal to purchase and serve Michigan-grown fruits, vegetables, and legumes. With this first round announcement, the program will serve a total enrollment of nearly 554,000 children in the school, early childhood education and after school settings across the state, more than half of whom are eligible for free or reduced lunch. Continue reading

Michigan’s 10 Cents a Meal program has grown from a regional pilot to a statewide program with five million dollars in state funding. Throughout those years of growth, 10 Cents has supported the purchase of millions of dollars of fruits, vegetables, and legumes from Michigan farmers and food vendors that were served to Michigan schoolchildren. Continue reading

The Michigan Department of Education has announced that it is accepting applications for the 10 Cents A Meal for Michigan's Kids & Farms, a state-funded grant providing matching incentive funding up to 10 cents per meal to purchase and serve Michigan-grown fruits, vegetables, and legumes. The program is open to school districts (public, public school academies, or private), and non-school sponsors of USDA Child Nutrition Programs such as residential childcare institutions (RCCIs), and child care centers participating in the Summer Food Service Program (SFSP), National School Lunch Program (NSLP) or the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP). Continue reading

KENTWOOD, MI - Governor Gretchen Whitmer signed HB 4411, the $17.1 billion K-12 budget, into law on July 13, surrounded by students and faculty at East Kentwood High School. The bill accounts for the largest single-year School Aid Fund budget ever passed by the state, and included funding for 10 Cents a Meal for Michigan’s Kids & Farms at $4.5 million*, more than doubling the funding from $2 million in 2020-21.  Continue reading

"Almost everything on Kavanaugh’s salad bar now is Michigan-grown. And during COVID, she’s tucked locally grown apples, pears, plums, cucumbers, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, broccoli, green beans, carrots, and tomatoes into sacks and family boxes for children and their families to eat at home." Continue reading

Contemplations on Peanut Butter & Jelly "That is the most beautiful thing to me about food, that it’s the people who make the food taste good, whether that’s by growing it, delivering it, cooking it, or enjoying it alongside you. It’s people who make food special. It’s the attention to detail and the willingness to carefully, lovingly wrap a peanut butter and jelly sandwich."  Continue reading

The Michigan Department of Education (MDE) has awarded the Flint Community Schools district a $170,000 grant as part of the second round of the agency’s 10 Cents a Meal for Michigan’s Kids & Farms (10 Cents a Meal) program. The application process reopened in January 2021 after an initial round of schools and early childhood education centers (ECEs) were announced in December 2020, bringing the total number of grantees to 149 and hailing from across the entire state for the first time. The Flint schools award is the single largest grant awarded for the 2020-21 grant cycle. Continue reading