Community Wellness Project
Project: Local Food for Local Kids: Food Equity for Chimacum School Meals
Request: $15,000
Many Chimacum students rely on school meals for a well-balanced diet because food is short at home. Approximately 67% are eligible for free and reduced-price lunch. And the district has recently lost the federal Community Eligibility Provision that allowed all students to eat breakfast and lunch free — so Community Wellness Project expects the number of hungry children to rise.
Chimacum's School Food Authority is facing an unprecedented deficit. School leaders are being forced to sacrifice other educational programming just to fund meals this year.
Community Wellness Project is the nonprofit partner behind Chimacum's school gardens and garden education. With UGN/Give Jefferson funding, CWP can ramp up school-based food production and deliver more fresh, whole, garden-grown food into school kitchens — at no additional cost to the school meals program.
Here are the problems you can help solve
Most people never see how school food money actually moves. As food costs rise and education funding falls, the gap between what a meal costs and what federal reimbursement pays keeps widening. Fresh and local food becomes cost-prohibitive. To bring costs down, kitchens get pushed toward processed and ultra-processed thaw-and-serve convenience food.
Meanwhile, the pressures have arrived all at once: cuts to school funding through the Department of Education and USDA; cuts to SNAP and to the Community Eligibility Provision; cuts from OSPI to programs supporting experiential education; and inflation, fuel and fertilizer costs outpacing reimbursement rates. CWP's Farm to School work was historically funded through USDA and OSPI — the USDA program has shifted toward larger projects requiring greater match, and the state eliminated the OSPI funding entirely.
Chimacum does hold a WSDA local-purchasing grant for 2026–27. It amounts to less than 2% of the projected deficit.
What your donation makes possible
$5,000–$7,500 covers the nonprofit infrastructure that almost no grant will fund but without which nothing else exists: general liability and volunteer board insurance, accounting, tax preparation, bank fees and software. The remaining $7,500–$10,000 buys staff time — roughly 5.5 additional hours per week — to increase garden production across the grades and to collaborate regularly with the high school's half-day culinary arts program.
CWP expects to triple food production. At a conservative $4 per pound, every 1,000 pounds grown delivers $4,000 of food value into school meals, while building student skills and strengthening the local food system.
The bottom line
Research from the National Farm to School Network shows that when schools serve local food, 33.1% of students eat more fruits and vegetables — and when schools have school gardens, 44.2% do. Students who grow food become braver eaters with broader palates. Time in school gardens is also associated with fewer discipline problems.
Your donation puts fresh food on a lunch tray that would otherwise hold something processed, relieves pressure on a school budget in genuine trouble, and teaches a few hundred kids how food actually comes to be. That's a lot of work for one gift to do.
