By Jay Worrall
President, Helping Harvest
Every child deserves the chance to learn, grow, and reach their full potential. But that potential has a foundation, and simple as it sounds, the foundation starts with food.
Early childhood is a period of rapid, irreversible brain development, and what children eat during these years has lasting consequences that will follow them into adulthood. A 2025 review published in ScienceDirect found that both under-nutrition and poor diet quality can disrupt critical developmental processes, affecting cognition, emotional regulation, and long-term mental health.
Children who are undernourished consistently score lower on standardized tests, language development, and school achievement. What’s even more concerning is that those deficits persist even after a child’s nutritional status improves.
To put it plainly: No matter what other investments we make in the life of a child — quality teachers, enrichment programs, supportive communities — without adequate nutrition, no other intervention can succeed.
This is far from an abstract concern. In fact, it’s an urgent crisis unfolding before our very eyes. The demand for food assistance has been steadily increasing since the pandemic. In 2025, Helping Harvest Fresh Food Bank distributed more than 11.1 million pounds of food across our two-county service territory in eastern Pennsylvania, our biggest year on record.
We could have optimistically hoped that 2025 was a fluke; a peak fueled by federal funding cuts, budget delays, and a government shutdown. But, informed by the post-COVID era, many of us in the charitable food system knew better and suspected that was not the case. Instead, we speculated that 2025 was merely a glimpse into the “new normal” of demand for food assistance.
Those of us who were more pessimistic — or at least realistic — at the end of 2025 are now sadly being proved right. In each of the first four months of 2026, Helping Harvest has surpassed 1 million pounds distributed. As of the end of April, we havedistributed 36.2% more food than during the same period last year and are on pace to shatter that 2025 record.
Demand is not declining. It is accelerating. And as gas and grocery prices continue to skyrocket, more and more families, including working families who never imagined they would need food assistance, are struggling to put adequate, nutritious meals on the table. Children are bearing the weight of the struggle in ways that will impact their lives, and therefore our communities, for years to come.
At Helping Harvest, we have made a deliberate commitment to meeting children’s nutritional needs at every stage of development.
Our Weekender Program provides more than 4,200 students each week with easy-to-prepare meals and snacks for the weekends, when school cafeterias are closed. Our Healthy Sprouts Program has regularly distributed fresh food to children in the city of Reading since 2010. Our School Pantry Program reaches middle- and high-school students and their families in a familiar environment, removing barriers to access. Both the Weekender and School Pantry programs set new distribution records in 2025.
But we also recognize that if a child arrives at preschool already behind developmentally due to insufficient nutrition in their earliest years, we are already too late. That is why we created our Maternal Health Program, made possible by a Jewish Healthcare Foundation Healthy Food Access grant. Through partnerships with WIC offices, Nurse-Family Partnership programs, pediatrician offices, and others, we are delivering nutrient-dense, high-protein foods directly to food-insecure pregnant and postpartum individuals, because good nutrition begins before birth.
There is nothing we can do that has a greater or more lasting impact than ensuring children are fed, and fed well, during these crucial developmental years. The children growing up in our communities today are tomorrow’s workforce, neighbors, leaders and caregivers. Their ability to not just contribute to this community, but to thrive in it, depends on the foundation we give them now. Hunger is a solvable problem. And it requires all of us.
We hope you will join us at Helping Harvest and similar organizations in the region as part of the solution. Give financially. Donate food. Volunteer your time. And stay engaged, because even when the headlines move on, the need will not. Learn how you can help at helpingharvest.org. or www.feedingamerica.org/.
Jay Worrall is president of Helping Harvest Fresh Food Bank, the Feeding America Partner agency serving Berks and Schuylkill counties. He is board chair of Feeding Pennsylvania.
