Northern Illinois Food Bank expands summer meals to reach more children

Northern Illinois Food Bank moved into summer with a broader, more layered hunger response, opening its Summer 2026 Meals Program and Fresh Family Mart across 13 counties as school meals dropped off for the season. The rollout combined 138 Summer Food Service Program sites with weekly produce distributions at six Fresh Family Mart locations, including Zion, Kankakee, Addison, Elgin, DeKalb and Aurora.

The scale matters because Northern Illinois Food Bank is already moving food through a large regional system. The organization says its network includes 900 food pantries and feeding programs and that it distributes 93 million meals a year across the region. That makes summer less of a standalone program than a pressure test of the whole operation: how well the food bank can keep child-friendly meals and fresh produce flowing when families lose the easy structure of the school day.

Last year, the Summer Meals Program delivered 7,000 meals a day to children across Northern Illinois. This year, the food bank expected even more need, pointing to earlier school calendars, persistent school food and gas costs, and changes to SNAP benefits that can strain family budgets. The 2025 program had already signaled how large the demand was, with 7,500 free meals daily planned across 13 counties from June 2 to August 15 and an average of 7,600 children served each day through 112 sites for after-school snacks or cold suppers, totaling more than 285,600 meals.

The summer structure also shows how food banks are increasingly blending distribution models instead of relying on one fixed site type. Fresh Family Mart adds produce to the equation, giving families weekly access to fruits and vegetables alongside the USDA Summer Food Service Program. For operations teams and volunteer coordinators, that kind of mix is practical. It spreads demand across schools, libraries, churches and public spaces, while giving families more than shelf-stable food.

Northern Illinois Food Bank said meals are available at no cost and that no registration or ID is required. That low-barrier setup lines up with federal summer meal rules: the Summer Food Service Program is funded by USDA and administered by the Illinois State Board of Education, and USDA says free on-site summer meals are available for all kids 18 and under without an application.

The food bank also points families to Summer EBT, which provides $120 in grocery benefits to eligible children over the summer. Julie Yurko, who has led Northern Illinois Food Bank as president and CEO since 2014 and joined the organization in 2009, has helped build a summer response that now works on several fronts at once: more sites, more produce, more days and more families reached when school cafeterias go quiet.