The Children Are Here.

“That kid just stuffed his pockets with your fruit snacks.”

We’ve reached a point in the American timeline I hoped I’d never witness: a moment when people feel entitled to scold a nonprofit for allowing hungry children to take food.

Every time I think we can’t sink lower in our disregard for one another, we find a new depth.

Our organization sends food home every weekend with 3,350 local children to ensure they don’t endure those days without eating. What was once a “small nonprofit” has grown into programming that reaches more than 160,000 children. And still, it’s not enough.

Childhood hunger is an epidemic people don’t want to see.

When I tell someone, “Over 70% of children in our school system are food insecure,” they almost always recoil in disbelief.

But the number is much higher; this is an outdated statistic prior to inflation or benefit cuts.

In my experience, children will not only hesitate to express when their needs are not being met, they will go out of their way to hide it. There are always telling signs, though: “Empty eyes, empty plates.”

And lately, we’ve seen a staggering number of empty eyes.

This summer, we looked for new ways to reach children slipping through the cracks. We partnered with agencies distributing free pet food (because if the pets are hungry, the kids almost certainly are). We sent extra bags to organizations seeing an increase in teenagers being cast out of their homes. We stocked emergency service vehicles with simple instructions: If you’re unsure, leave the bag.

One of the simplest strategies we adopted was bringing food with us to every community event. We lined our table with backpacks filled with ready-to-eat items: protein sticks, fruit snacks, granola bars. At almost every event, the backpacks were emptied within the hour.

One of the most troubling yet recurring instances I continue to witness is the teenager trying to feed his younger siblings at our table. The teen’s face changes at every event, but the actions are always the same.

On this day, it’s a young man with a gray T-shirt and three smaller children at his side. As they reach into the bags, he instructs them they can each have one snack, then shoos them away. He lingers, his eyes on me without making eye contact.

“You can take more,” I tell him. “The more you grab, the less I have to carry back.”

He politely declines, but he doesn’t leave.

I turn away to give him privacy. He crouches, quickly stuffing his pockets. He isn’t stealing; he’s calculating what he’ll ration for later.

Then comes the woman from a nearby booth. Angry. Determined. Marching toward me as if reporting a crime.

“Did you see that kid? Both pockets! Filled them!”

I did, I tell her. We’re fine with that.

“Give stuff out like that and you’re not going to have enough for anyone else who needs it,” she says angrily. I gesture to the boxes of backstock and assure her we’ll be fine. But she won’t let up.

“You think one kid needed all of that?”

I point out the children with him and assure her that he does indeed. Her face falls a bit at the realization, but she has dug her self-righteous heels in and cannot relent.

“Well, where are their parents? It’s on them to feed them, not us.”

This is where I believe she’s wrong. I don’t know where their parents are – working, incarcerated, overwhelmed, sick, vanished or simply unable.

But I know exactly where the children are. Right here. And they are hungry.

“The poor will always be among us” and “what you do to the least of these, you do to me” are quoted often, but rarely understood. Their meaning feels sharper now than at any other time in my lifetime.

“It won’t get better if you keep feeding these kids for them,” she insists.

She means our nation. I don’t know what “better” she imagines. Whatever version exists in her mind, and in the minds of so many across this country, it seems to depend on punishing children for the failures or absences of adults.

The conclusion that starving kids is somehow part of a solution is a moral sickness I refuse to accept.

I do not have all the answers. I don’t know the perfect policy, the perfect program or the perfect path out of this crisis.

But I do know this: My one constant, the truth that cuts through every argument, every accusation, every politicized sound bite. And this is all the truth I need.

The children are here. And they are hungry.