The Boys & Girls Club of Greater Nashua unveiled its new kitchen, the Gupta Family Cafe, on Tuesday. It’s part of a $10 million capital campaign to expand and enhance its facilities.
Director Craig Fitzgerald said 60% of the club members come from low-income families. Many of them also go to the club for breakfast, after school snacks and dinner. The club is currently serving about 45,000 hot meals every year, but Fitzgerald estimates the new kitchen will allow the club to serve an additional 30,000 hot meals every year and help address food insecurity in Nashua.
“A core component of healthy lifestyles is making sure that [kids] have food and nutrition available to them,” he said. “Our job is to serve as many children as possible and to make sure none of them grow hungry.”
Jessica Gorhan from New Hampshire Hunger Solutions said that expanding meal programs like the one at the Boys & Girls Club helps kids who are dealing with food insufficiency. She explained food insufficiency means that some kids don’t have the right kind of foods for a healthy lifestyle.
“It doesn't mean that people have zero food in their cabinets, but it might all be peanut butter and jelly, or all mac and cheese, or all ramen,” she said.
Gorhan added these kinds of programs also help kids that fall through the system. Right now, kids can qualify for free lunch at school if their family earns below 135% of poverty level – around $40,000 a year for a family of four. Kids can get a reduced price for 185% of the poverty poverty level – a little over $50,000 a year for a family of four.
Nashua has a high number of kids who are eligible for free or reduced lunch, according to data from New Hampshire Hunger Solutions. About 4 out of every 10 students qualify, nearly double the state average.
About 4,000 students in Nashua are eligible, but Gorhan said up to 1,000 of them might not be enrolled for the free or reduced price lunches because of language or paperwork barriers.
“We know that we are seeing more food insufficiency in our state,” she said. “There's a bunch of kids that are eligible and not enrolled, and then a bunch of kids who have a need but aren't eligible.”
For Boys & Girls club staff member Tori Roñdon-Escalera, the kitchen is a symbol of how the club is changing and adapting. She helped out in the kitchen while she worked on Junior Staff as a teenager. Now, she works with the science, technology, engineering, art and math program and doesn’t spend much time in the kitchen anymore.
However, like many of the club’s staff, she had to adapt around the logistics of building the kitchens and painting the new murals.
“I was a kid here. So just seeing the way that it's transformed and like how you can make an older space become something new and something beautiful,” she said. “It's important for [kids’] food to not only come up with love, but somewhere that is very loved, too.”
