How School Food Pantries Help Foster Health and Well-Being
Key Highlights:
- Elevance Health supports school-based food pantries in the Atlanta area, Indianapolis, and New York City, providing convenient access to nutritious food for families at no cost.
- These pantries help reduce hunger, ease financial stress, and support student learning by offering reliable food access in trusted school environments.
- By stocking nutritious food, engaging associate volunteers, and partnering with Common Threads to provide nutrition education, the pantry initiatives strengthen community health and promote the long-term well-being of children and families.
Angela and her two children wander along a makeshift grocery aisle, perusing shelves lined with cereal, pasta, sweet potatoes, and colorful bell peppers. Angela’s daughter — a first-grader sporting side ponytails and a white sweater dotted with pink hearts — loves bananas and helps the family stock up. Her son, a third-grader, flashes a mischievous smile that’s missing multiple front teeth.
The family isn’t in their neighborhood grocery store on this crisp Friday morning. Instead, they’re toting and filling bags at Brookside School 54, a prekindergarten and elementary school in the Near Eastside community of Indianapolis that’s home to a food pantry supported by Elevance Health.
The pantry sits in the back of the school’s white and green cafeteria, where portraits of Harriet Tubman, former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and baseball Hall of Famer Roberto Clemente decorate the walls. It serves families with children at the school on the third Friday of every month, and residents of the wider community on the second Saturday.
For Angela, a delivery driver who was at first reluctant about using the pantry, the support it provides has been helpful. She made her first visit during a week when money for food was particularly tight.
Schools are anchors in their communities. When we support people through these trusted spaces, we’re addressing hunger while also advancing health and opportunity.”
Elevance Health Chief Health Officer
Making Nutritious Food Easier to Access
The Brookside pantry is one of three school-based food pantries developed in 2021 in a partnership between Elevance Health and the nonprofit Heart of America. It’s one example of how our company’s holistic approach to health translates into tangible support for individuals, families, and communities.
As they help families like Angela’s meet an everyday need that shapes their health and often weighs on household budgets, these types of food resources can improve well-being by:
- Reducing Food Insecurity: In 2024, 18.3 million households in the United States had difficulty at some point getting enough food for an active, healthy life. School-based pantries can provide a reliable, local source of groceries at no cost, helping families fill gaps when budgets are tight.
- Making Food More Accessible: Not everyone can easily reach larger food banks due to transportation, limited hours of operation, or other reasons. Many families visit school buildings several times a week or can get to one nearby, making this type of pantry location far more convenient.
- Building Trust and Community: People can access food in a familiar, supportive environment, helping create an atmosphere that reduces stigma and fosters stronger relationships between schools and the families they serve.
- Supporting Student Learning and Success: Hunger can affect a child’s ability to focus, learn, and perform in school. Ensuring a child isn’t experiencing hunger may set them up for greater academic success.
- Providing Nutritional Support Beyond School Meals: Meals provided to students at school may not be offered during evenings, weekends, or school breaks. Pantries help ensure children have access to food outside school hours.
- Reducing Stress for Families: Parents and caregivers who are worried about feeding children can experience added stress. Pantries can provide relief, allowing families to focus more energy on things like work and school.
- Offering a Pathway to Additional Resources: Families who visit school-based food pantries might also learn about additional support. In some instances, schools or school pantries may be able to offer connections to resources like the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program, or local resources that promote health and well-being.
A Recipe for Community Health
In Angela’s Near Eastside neighborhood and the adjacent Martindale-Brightwood area of Indianapolis, survey results indicate more than 80% of households earn less than $50,000 a year. Around half of survey respondents said they visit a church or food pantry to help them get groceries.
In broader Marion County, Indiana — home to Indianapolis — around 16% of people overall and nearly 24% of children recently lived in a household experiencing food insecurity, according to the latest estimates from the nonprofit Feeding America. Across the Hoosier State, more than 1 million people lived in a household that experienced food insecurity in 2023, and more than 570,000 received SNAP benefits in September.
“Access to nutritious food fuels healthier lives and stronger communities,” said Dr. Shantanu Agrawal, chief health officer at Elevance Health. “By helping to provide that access, we’re not just addressing hunger, we’re investing in the long-term health and vitality of these communities.”
At Brookside and similar setups at College Park Elementary School near Atlanta and Walter Weaver Elementary School in New York City, Elevance Health helps keep the pantries stocked during the school year and associate volunteers participate in distributions.
Each pantry includes a refrigerator and freezer for fresh or perishable food. The nonprofit Common Threads began providing nutrition and culinary education at the schools in 2022, offering students, teachers, and caregivers interactive opportunities to learn more about what it means to choose and eat nutritious foods.
These partnerships help ensure families can access the essentials for good health in trusted, familiar places — where learning and well-being can grow hand in hand.
“Schools are anchors in their communities,” Agrawal said. “When we support people through these trusted spaces, we’re addressing hunger while also advancing health and opportunity.”