Above: Robert Campbell (Emerson ’03). In 2024 Robert was recognized by the Hunger Center with the Outstanding Alum Award for his advocacy work with Feeding America, particularly the instrumental role he has played in developing and advocating for Summer EBT.
Summer can be a challenging time for food-insecure families. Children that rely on nutritious school meals nine months of the year lose access to those meals when school is out. And while the Summer Food Service Program exists to cover the gap, a serious challenge to implementation has consistently hindered its reach: the congregate feeding requirement. According to long-standing federal regulations, community sponsors who served summer meals had to ensure that all children ate them together in the same place. If they didn’t, sponsors could have been denied reimbursement for the meals, or be kicked out of the program altogether.
“Since its foundation the summer feeding programs have really struggled to meet people where they are,” observes Robert Campbell, Vice President of Policy at Feeding America and Hunger Fellow alum (Emerson ’03). “It’s built on getting kids to come to a specific location for a period of time, for at least a meal, hopefully more programming, and then to move on. That’s a challenging model. In a school setting, you have transportation and bussing to make sure kids can get to a specific location. But all that goes away in the summer.”
The issue of keeping children fed over the summer is one to which that Robert has devoted his professional attention for decades, including the last ten years he’s spent at the largest hunger nonprofit in the U.S. It’s also an issue that he focused on starting with his very early days as a Hunger Fellow.
Originally from southern Alabama, Robert joined the Emerson Fellowship after graduating from Rhodes College, where he majored in urban studies with a focus on housing issues in the local community. His fellowship placement with Florida Impact in Tallahassee involved connecting children in the panhandle region of the state with summer meals. At the time, some rural counties in that region had no congregate feeding sites where summer meals could be offered. Robert and his field partner, Jenna Churchman, were brought in to help close the gap.
“We asked ourselves, ‘how might we find community members to help prop up summer feeding sites?’ And we thought, ‘well, maybe churches.’ So, we’d pick up the phone, and literally go down a phone book and call the churches. We wanted to introduce the issue and find people to help make it happen. As a fellow, I knew I was only there temporarily—the organization wasn’t adding staff, but this was an opportunity to see how we might connect the dots.”
Following his fellowship, Robert stayed on with his policy placement FRAC as a legislative assistant, completed his Master’s degree at Berkeley, and worked for the Federal Government at USDA and GAO until 2014, when he joined Feeding America as a Senior Policy Analyst.
He explains how expanding summer meals had been a priority at Feeding America for some time before he joined. He then counts off a list of experimental pilot projects and workarounds to address the challenging congregate feeding requirement. From serving grab-and-go prepared meals to using school buses as delivery vans to bring meals directly to families, each model came with benefits and drawbacks. But the pilots that used an EBT card1 to deliver replacement benefits directly to families seemed to be the most promising of all. “Hands-down, EBT could cut through so many of the logistical challenges to reach kids and families in a way that would work for them, at a time of year that’s notoriously challenging logistically.”
For years Summer EBT remained a small-scale pilot project. But when the COVID-19 pandemic made gathering for meals risky, an opportunity opened to advocate for its expansion. “You better believe we were there and ready,” he recalls. “We dropped everything to jump on phone calls, provide technical assistance, answer any questions they had, all to be ready to make it a permanent opportunity.” And in late 2022, Congress passed and President Biden signed into law a permanent national Summer EBT program. That program, now branded as SUN Bucks, rolled out this summer in 39 U.S. States and Territories, the Cherokee and Chickasaw Nations, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico2.
Robert remembers where he was when he found out that Summer EBT was finally a reality. “I was sitting in my office—this was still the pandemic era, so I was in my son’s room, right next to his closet. I was on a call, and when it was shared that we were looking at a nationwide summer EBT program, I remember thinking either I misheard, or they misspoke.
“I said ‘I’m sorry, did you just say a nationwide summer EBT program?’ My colleague confirmed, yes, this is nationwide. I definitely squealed a little bit. I’m proud of that squeal. It was visceral and became audible when reality quickly sank in: there was going to be fundamental, systematic improvement to the way we feed kids in the summer.”
Robert highlights the importance of building trusting relationships and deep listening as critical components of making lasting change. “It was talking to individuals, talking to families, talking to kids, to find out what works. What do you need outside of what we’re already offering? How might we test that? How might we listen to you in evaluations?
“When we listen to people, when we hear them, when we let that sink in, when we use that to challenge the status quo, that’s when we can find transformative solutions.”
Since his fellowship, Robert has remained in close contact with the Hunger Center as a dedicated alum, serving as a supervisor for numerous Emerson Fellows’ policy placements, and regularly serving as a speaker at orientations and trainings. He recognizes the pivotal role the fellowship played in his own development and enjoys every opportunity to be able to build community with new leaders in the anti-hunger community.
“It allows me to stay grounded in some ways,” he explains. “I remember the nighttime conversations during the fellowship—debating what it means to serve people, what it means to allow hunger in our country, what it means to design a society and a social contract. I am older and more jaded now than I was then, but all of that is still inside me. And when I come back to the Hunger Center, I talk to fellows and learn from fellows. I feel that energy, and it reminds me who I am. It reminds me why I stay in this work, and why I want to continue trying to make change. I’ve never had interactions with Hunger Fellows that didn’t leave me better off.”
For people early in their careers considering how they can get involved in ending hunger, Robert has this advice: “Go and have conversations. For myself, I always look for opportunities to talk to people who I want to be like. I encourage other people, at all ages and all stages of their careers, to call people up and ask them about what they do and why they do it.”
“And if you want to be involved in working for food security: we need you. There are many ways to be involved, and nothing you do is too small. I’m a firm believer that all of the work we do, even if incremental, is absolutely vital. As nonprofits, as advocates, we sometimes have to move mountains to make incremental progress. That incremental progress has value on its own, but it also informs how we might need to do things differently to move past incremental progress.”
When asked what’s next, Robert waxes philosophical. “You know, it will be a major professional reward to have had any part in seeing a permanent Summer EBT program come to fruition,” he reflect. “That doesn’t happen in whole careers, in whole lifetimes. I hope that’s not the biggest or only win in my professional career in my lifetime! But in the meantime, I want to find ways to establish teams, build relationships, support people, and find ways to set us up for whatever might come in the future.”
- Electronic benefits card, like a credit card, also used to deliver SNAP benefits [↩]
- See USDA’s official SUN Bucks page. While the program is national, individual states and jurisdictions may elect not to opt into the program. As of this writing 13 states have yet to adopt SUN Bucks, while New Hampshire is finalizing its plan to start offering the meals next year. [↩]