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NYC Teens Developing App To Buy Lunches For Students In Need

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- Imagine helping schoolchildren in need get nutritious lunches every day with just a tap of your phone.

That's the goal of a team of students from the Upper East Side's Brearley School looking for funding to create "Food For Thought," a smartphone app allowing people to anonymously pay for students' lunches through donations into students' accounts.

The group currently has a "Go Fund Me" account set up, and the team competed in the Allstate Foundation Good Starts Young Rally in June to win $2,000 toward their goal.

The "Pay it Forward w/ Food for Thought" is currently about two-thirds the way to its goal of $1,500 in additional funds.

"We, like many other New Yorkers, overlooked the food deserts and the hungry children," the group posted on their funding pitch. "We learnt that more than 1.3 million New York City residents, or 16.4% of the city's population, lived in a food insecure household."

Getting lunches to student through schools is gaining priority as a tactic for feeding kids after an NYU study found that the problem of "food deserts" in New York City is not helped by more local supermarkets in those communities.

"Food deserts" are typically low-income areas that have few or no supermarkets, where residents mainly get groceries from delis or bodegas that offer little in the way of dietary choices, fresh fruits or vegetables.

The report found "while there were small, inconsistent changes over the time periods, there were no appreciable differences in availability of healthful or unhealthful foods at home, or in children's dietary intake as a result of the supermarket."

The "Food for Thought" app would instead work directly with students' email through schools' pre-paid lunch system, giving them credit to purchase meals.

"After seeing that so many students were either at risk or current going hungry we researched the stigma related to poverty and found that students and their parents were being publicly humiliated for not being able to pay for their lunches," the group wrote. "We want to raise awareness for childhood hunger and ease the lives of many students. Food for Thought is our way of helping students get food and circumvent the societal stigma related to poverty."

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