Remember your best summer job? Lifeguard, camp counselor, doing odd jobs around your neighborhood and taking hour-long breaks to lay in the sunshine? Ahhh.

Now through mid-August, we’re giving kids free healthy food. And we have a little help doing it.

Seattle as a whole will have 2,000 interns this year through the Summer Youth Employment Program, or SYEP. United Way alone has 14 of them as part of our work with young people who are disconnected from work and school. They will be ending childhood hunger through our free summer meals program.

What’s the summer meals program? No school in the summer = no school meals for low-income kids. That extra $316 per month on food is bad news for families already on tight budgets. Over a summer, it’s nearly $1,000 they can’t spend on other necessities, like car repairs.

So we’ve set up hundreds of summer meal sites around King County where kids 18 and under can eat free healthy food. This program is part of our work to keep families stable.

Our 14 interns are working hard at the sites already. They’ve merged with our huge group of AmeriCorps VISTAs. Think the A-team times 80. Who wouldn’t want to be part of that?

You can help too by sharing this Facebook post.

What those interns are up to:

• Coordinating outreach to get more hungry kids to sites.
• Planning events and activities at sites, like library reading days.
• Helping us reach our goal of serving more summer meals this year.

And the internship is paid, thanks to a mix of federal and local funds. Paid internship that helps kids and our community? We’ll take one of those.