When school let out last June, Maria braced herself.

Three kids home all day, a grandmother with dietary needs of her own, and a refrigerator that never quite kept up. Maria works as a hotel housekeeper. Her mother, Elena, helps care for the children on a fixed income. Summer, when school meals disappear, and grocery bills climb, has always been the hardest stretch.

For families like Maria’s, food insecurity doesn’t announce itself. It’s quieter than that. It’s the low hum of worry on the way to a long shift. It’s a grandmother skipping her own meals to stretch the ingredients a little further. It’s kids who should be spending summer being kids, caught instead in the uncertainty of whether there will be enough.

In Chatham County, that uncertainty is more common than most people know. Food insecurity touches families across every corner of our community, and it doesn’t look the same from household to household. It shifts with the seasons, with employment, with a fixed income that doesn’t stretch as far as it used to. For children, summer is often the most vulnerable time of year, when the school meals that quietly sustained them all year long simply stop.

SNACK! was created to meet that moment.

SNACK! stands for Summer Nutritional Assistance for Chatham Kids. Each week throughout the summer, every enrolled child receives enough food for 21 meals, packed with fresh produce, dairy, grains, and pantry staples, distributed through 13 sites across the county, in the places families already live and gather.

In summer 2025, SNACK! served 1,452 children, providing more than 203,000 meals and nearly 244,000 pounds of food. That’s nearly 10 percent more children than the year before, with one new site added to reach families in parts of Chatham County that hadn’t been served before.

For Maria’s family, the boxes every two weeks meant something specific. Her oldest would eat anything. Her seven-year-old wanted fruit at every meal. Her youngest had a devoted loyalty to mac and cheese. On the weeks the box included Oreos, all five of them split them at the kitchen table.

That’s what CORA is here for. A mother who could leave for a long shift without that low hum of worry. A grandmother who didn’t have to skip her own meals. Three kids who got to spend the summer being kids.

SNACK! launches this June. If you’d like to learn more, volunteer at a distribution site, or support the work that makes it possible, we’d love to connect. Please email [email protected].