Free School Meals and Demand for Community Food Resources

Abstract

Many community organizations provide services similar to government income assistance programs but there is little empirical evidence on how these systems interact. We examine how greater access to government nutritional aid through free school meals affects local food bank utilization by leveraging variation in the timing of schoolwide free meal programs and administrative data from largest food bank network in the United States. We find that increasing access to free meals by 10 percentage points reduces food bank use by about 0.5 percent, and up to 1 percent in areas where relatively few students previously qualified for free meals.