A Year of Success: Share Our Strength’s Work in India

We believe every kid deserves to have the meals they need to thrive. Unfortunately, hunger is a reality for millions of children around the world. For years, Share Our Strength has been at the forefront of working with schools and community organizations to ensure kids have three meals a day 365 days of the year. 

The bulk of our work has been in the United States, but over the years we have learned important lessons that we want to share with partners across the globe, so together we can end childhood hunger, not only in the US, but everywhere in the world. Our recent international work has focused on India.

How Share Our Strength Works Internationally

Share Our Strength is a diverse community of inspired people, sharing our strengths, so all children and families live without hunger or poverty. Even with the majority of our work focused in the US, we’ve always had a commitment to supporting global hunger and poverty through grants to organizations fighting hunger globally. 

In addition to providing grants to our global partners, we are now sharing our best practices around fundraising, brand building, advocacy and grassroots organizing. The goal is to help our partners build a sustainable source of revenue so that they can scale their work, ultimately reaching more kids with the food they need to grow and thrive.

Our international work is connected to the origins of the organization; Share Our Strength was founded in 1984 by siblings Billy and Debbie Shore in response to the Ethiopian famine. 

Our Current Priorities

Over the past years, we have focused on building partnerships in India to expand access to meals to kids. Some of our partners there include the Akshaya Patra Foundation, Annapoorna, The Breakfast Revolution and others. Akshaya Patra is the largest school meals NGO in the world, serving a hot midday meal to more than 2 million children every day, but it’s only a small fraction of the need.

Together, we have set the goal of adding an additional 1 million children to receive this meal over the next 5 years.

To achieve this, we will continue collaborating with our partners to identify gaps in the delivery of meals, engage additional organizations that can support us to reach this goal, and we will continue working with Akshaya Patra to identify and improve kitchens operating at less than full capacity as well as building a new kitchen in the city of Nagpur.

While prioritizing India, we will continue to explore ways in which we can add value to other countries committed to reaching more children through school meals.

2023 Successes

• In February of 2023, we organized our first Feed the Future Now event in Nagpur, India (inspired by our Taste of a Nation events in the US), energizing the local community and philanthropic leaders raising funds to build a new Akshaya Patra Kitchen in Nagpur that will serve an additional 15,000 meals daily.
• We broke ground with the kitchen in Nagpur.The first meal from this kitchen is expected to be served in early 2024.
• We have continued building a coalition of business leaders, celebrity chefs and government officials that have aligned with our goal of feeding 1 million more kids in the next few years. 

As the work in India continues to grow, we are excited about the opportunities to continue making a difference for kids across the world. 

Referencing her last trip to India, Debbie Shore said “The experience here reinforced to me that the desire to be a part of something larger than ourselves, sharing our strengths and talents and setting our children up to reach their full potential is universal and alive and well in India. Convening people from across industries, giving them a platform to do something meaningful, introducing a brand new idea and having fun all at the same time plays squarely into our core values”.

How You Can Help

Donate: India struggles with some of the world’s highest rates of childhood hunger, but also boasts the world’s largest and most impressive school meal program. India’s mid-day meal is served to millions of children every day, but reaches only a fraction of children in need. Share Our Strength, in close partnership with partners in India, is launching an effort to reach millions more children over the next three years. With your help we can reach millions of kids in India.