Startup Eat My Lunch has officially smashed the goal of $120,000 during its crowdfunding campaign on PledgeMe to support the work it is doing to alleviate child poverty in New Zealand.
Eat My Lunch operates a ‘buy one give one’ model for lunches, which has allowed them to provide more than 60,000 lunches over the past 10 weeks to children in South Auckland. While sharing details about its history, the company explained:
“Late October last year, over a couple of wines on Waiheke Island, [co-founders] Lisa and Iaan were reflecting on their marketing careers, realizing that they had been selling fat, salt and sugar to the NZ public for 30 years between them. With four young children, they found it ironic that the very products they had marketed so successfully were not allowed in their own home.
“As parents they couldn’t fathom that the country they were so proud to grow up in had children going to school hungry. The growing divide between the have’s and have-not’s should not be happening in a place like New Zealand. They decided that night to put their corporate experience to good use and start doing something that really mattered.
“Even though Lisa was a passionate home cook, they realized they needed some serious food expertise to get Eat My Lunch off the ground. Enter top NZ chef Michael Meredith who Lisa has known for years. Michael is deeply passionate about poverty in NZ (having experienced it himself growing up in Samoa). There was an instant shared passion and Michael has been there everyday at 6am making lunches with the team ever since.”
Eat My Lunch also provided these statistics:
1 in 4 Kiwi kids (260,000) live in poverty. Many don’t have access to basic nutrition which impacts on their ability to learn.- 67% of NZ adults and 33% of children are obese or over-weight, with NZ ranking as the third-fattest country in the OECD.
- The correlation between poverty, poor nutrition and obesity is clear – adults & children living in the most deprived areas are four times as likely to be obese as those living in the least deprived areas.
- There are 250,000 diabetics in NZ and a further 750,000 Kiwis are ‘pre-diabetic’.
- By 2016, obesity will overtake tobacco as the leading health risk in NZ.
PledgeMe CEO Anna Guenther said it was awesome to see Eat My Lunch reach its ambitious goal with the help of its crowd:
“Eat My Lunch has built an awesome crowd around their work, it’s fantastic to see the way they have activated their crowd so they they can keep on providing lunches to Kiwi kids who need them. Eat My Lunch has shown how crowdfunding allows social enterprises doing great work to really make a difference in the world and connect to their supporters.”
Lisa King, co-founder of Eat My Lunch said that now they had hit their goal they would be looking at stretch goals for further funding.
“If we can get another $25-30k we will be able to fund a cooking school for under-privileged kids to educate them about cooking and nutrition.”
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