Okay hi everyone, hopefully this is working. I'm Richard Perdy, I'm the actor project architect and the fellow of the next foundation and I'm here to answer some questions. I don't quite see any yet. Okay I've got a message at least that at least things seem to be live and seem to be working so that's so far so good. So yeah if anybody has any questions please please ask away. So I'm being asked how did I first get involved in open source. My history was, I actually bought a small device at Sharps Arras and it came with Linux on it but it was a 2.4 kernel and it had certain limitations. So I started messing around with that. That led me to build systems to what was build routes at the time and then this project called open and embedded and everything grew from there so that's how I got started. So I'm being asked what the plan is for the Yocto project LTS releases. It's being asked how often the release is going to be marked as an LTS. Our current plan is probably every two years so 3.1 was released six months ago so that will be our LTS release for the next couple of years. That's the plan right now and it's great to see some of the traction that we're getting around but the LTS release it seems very popular with people so that's good. So a question now about reproducible builds. What's the current status of those in the Yocto project? We've made a lot of good progress so we now have automated reproducible reproducibility testing on the auto builder. I think that's currently working around core image so everything up to core image sato is now basically 100% reproducible. There's a lot of different definitions about what reproducible means. For us that means that it doesn't matter which distro you build it on or the path that you build it in it will always give exactly the same end result and we're testing that across multiple different distros at this point so it's quite an extensive test and so everything up to core image sato is the answer. I'm being asked about the 10th anniversary of Yocto project. There's actually a presentation about that. Geoff Rowe and Nico are passing present community managers are giving a presentation and I think I even feature in that video. So I'd say go and watch that presentation. I think for me it's amazing that the project's been going 10 years. It's great to see some of the places that it's gone and so on but I didn't think 10 years ago we'd be sitting here talking about the anniversary so it's cool. Biggest features coming to Yocto soon? I don't know. Why don't you tell us what features do people want to see? I mean we've seen some really significant changes more recently. The latest ones were the hash equivalents and the reproducibility. You know in the past we've had the recipes with excess roots and even the layer model was a new and bigger device of change at one point so there's been a lot of those over the last 10 years. It's hard to predict the future. It depends what people work on but I don't think we're done yet. I think there's a lot of good ideas out there. I'm just reading the question. So it's a question about whether there's any plans to work out the application order of variables. There's lots of ideas to do with that. I know that I did put a proposal out recently about default values. There was a number of flaws pointed out in that proposal I think. The trouble is as soon as we start changing anything it breaks compatibility and that does cause a lot of problems and one of the big advantages of what we have today is the flexibility in the power that those variables give you. So it's a really good question. I'm certainly open to creative ideas on how we could improve things but there is now quite a bit of legacy. There's 10 years of legacy for just the other project alone. So I've got mixed feelings on that. Even yesterday I was just messing around and seeing if I could actually try and make the passing a little bit faster because I had some ideas about where we might be losing some speed with that but it turns out it's only worth about 10% to 15%, not the huge gains I was hoping for. So it's certainly something we've gotten open mind to but it's also very hard to do given the legacy situation. So if you've got ideas please talk to us. My opinions about GUIs such as toaster, is it really useful? I'm actually a little disappointed that we haven't had more GUIs over the last 10 years. That's something that I would like to see. I mean toaster from a development standpoint has stalled a bit more recently and it doesn't have the sort of the critical mass of developers behind it. I think it needs to move forward and to gain new features. It's still working, it's still there, it's still being looked after but it's not really developing. So I would love to see more sort of GUIs built around the interfaces a bit bake provides or even on new interfaces. So yeah it's one of the things I think there's a lot of potential there for development. It's very difficult because the project is so wide encompassing to build a user interface around some of that functionality but when you get it right I think it's very rewarding. So yeah if I like toaster I'd like to see it grow more. I think we do need to improve some of the APIs we've got to bit bake itself but we have tried to create those. We've tried to create things like the tinfoil APIs so you can access these things. So I'd like to see more GUIs such as toaster but I also like to see more even command line type utilities directly integrate directly communicating with bit bake over likes of tinfoil. It's difficult to keep up with the questions as they come in. So about arguments to convince colleagues to migrate from migrate to the Octo project away from the Debian based OS. Concerns about reliability and test overhead. It's a good question. I mean Debian is good for some things. The Octo project is also is good for other things. It depends often what it is you're trying to do. If you've got sort of if you need to do any kind of license sort of auditing or disclosure then the Octo project is one of the best systems out there for that. You can't really do that from the Debian standpoint. I think our LTS story is a lot stronger now with some of the developments we had with the project. From a reliability standpoint I think once you have the Octo project working the way the technology we built into the system means once it's working it should stay working. It's designed to be reproducible. It's designed to give you exactly the same build result if you try and rebuild something in five years, ten years time or something like that. So I think from a reliability standpoint it's robust. It does need a little bit of upfront overhead for setup but once you've got there then it's phenomenal for being able to handle things like security fixes. If a security problem emerges and you need to patch the source code and then re-release it for some old binaries or whatever that you've probably shipped in the product. I think it's you're kind of taking control of your own destiny with something like Octo project whereas with Debian you're reliant on other people. How small can a of a root of s can pocky tiny make? That's a good question. There was a patch on the mailing list I noticed came in over the weekend that improves the size of tiny by I think it was saying 13 you know 13% reduction. It's always a feature trade-off. If you want to get rid of everything from your root of s you can have a really really small root of s. So you've really got to define what feature set of functionality that you want but if you can configure it, if you can configure Linux down to that size the Octo project can build it because we're a build tool. So it really comes down to which components you're using and the you know what functionality you want within that. So I mean if you can you can configure it down to something that's Norflath size or the EMC. So there's a question about the LTS release model is that focusing on securing pocky or does it focus on the build system? It's very much about making sure that the OS itself is secure as well. So at the moment LTS is focusing on the components in open embedded core but if there was a significant security issue you know the layers that would be something that we'd probably look at as well. And it's not just about the build system it's about making sure that the components that we're building in the core are staying you know staying secure, we're staying up to date, we're so monitoring CVs, we're monitoring issues that get reported to us but the LTS is whilst we've got a maintainer there who's putting two test cycles making the releases and pulling everything together we do require some you know help from the community in submissions to that. And I think going forward we're going to be I think we're in a good position for open embedded core beyond that I think there are things we can do there but it will need you know community help in making sure we get the patches, we get the issues reported to us and so on. So it really is going to be partly about the community collaborating together but we put all of the pieces in place to allow us to do that. It's much like Linux kernel you know the stable releases are going to be what people make of them. So help us with that but it is definitely not just focused on the build system it's focused beyond that in the components as well. So when we added recipes with access routes there was talk about task specific access routes. Task specific access routes was a realisation when we added recipes of access routes that things do change based on the tasks. The trouble is that some access routes need to be preserved between tasks so you can't change the sys routes from under the system between configure and compile for example that just will not work. Whether you whether there's a packaging sys route and a sort of a compilation sys route that might be something we could look at in the future there's nothing particularly hardcoded in the system that says they have to be recipe specific but that's certainly what made most sense at that time to implement. In the future we might do something like making host tools be recipe specific so currently the host tools are build wide and we might make those potentially recipe specific or something like that. We haven't found too many problems with task specific problems right now but it's something we certainly could think about in future there's nothing hardcoded in there related to that. So external tool chains good or bad practice um they probably have their uses in their places um I don't particularly like them I don't see that we really need them in most cases I do understand why they exist so I tend to ignore them but some people have done a good job of integrating them um a bit of the more mightest you I think um some people like them some people don't um but we in general we found people tend to move away from them um because you can in some ways I'd like to see the external tool chains built as sort of locked as a sort of locked estate for example rather than some of the current external external tool chain models but nobody's actually tried that yet um but yeah that they're kind of a fact of life the same as binaries on systems really. Can I explain the recent improvements made to Pseudo? I can I'm just trying to think how quickly I can do it. Yeah I think that was probably we'll come back to that one Professor if we've got time. So there's a question about why there's no way to strap up BSBSP layers using for example repo or sub modules. I think that was a contentious and slightly difficult decision we made early on in the project that we weren't going to mandate a way of doing that and it has turned into a little bit of the wild west with so many different ways of doing things. In some ways that's the strength of the project it means that people aren't locked into a particular way of doing things but I think we've always wondered about creating some sort of setup tool that would help with that in some way. It's there's a list of future directions that was published recently that the TSC had worked on the technical steering committee for the project and that is one of the set of issues of one of those one of those topics in there. So if you want to find out more information about that go and go and have a look at that document and ask us on the mailing list. But it's it's something I think we we probably do need to address at some point. That's probably one of those things in this next 10-year cycle but it's difficult because everybody has a very specific idea about what they want to do and how they want to do it. So it's by no means a simple a simple problem to address. So we're left with the pseudo question so I'll try and quickly I'll try and give a quick overview of that. The problem was that pseudo assumes one of the design assumptions in pseudo is that it assumes all the recipes can see but that that particular that pseudo is responsible for the permissions of everything in the system. So if you go and modify some files behind the scenes pseudo can lose track of things and get quite upset that those files have changed without its knowledge. You can't really tell or couldn't really tell pseudo just to focus on a specific directory. So the changes that we added were to allow pseudo to focus on one specific location and to ignore certain other paths and that leads to the database being a lot cleaner because it's not trying to track files that we don't actually care about but that means that certain recipes needed to be changed and so on. So it was a fairly late breaking problem that the issue that we had was that pseudo was tracking files which were then changing so inode numbers for example could be a file could be created with a given inode it could be deleted behind the scenes then a new file created that reused that inode and then pseudo was confusing permissions across those files. So the changes we've made are to try and address that. Okay so I think I've only got a few minutes left but I'll try my best to get through the the rest of the questions that are here. Can I explain what I meant by locked estate? This is where instead of bitbake calculating a particular hash for estate and then checking whether that hash exists in the estate instead you just tell bitbake that this particular task has this estate hash value and that's one of the ways in which the ESDK can work and so there's a locked signatures file it's a standard bitbake file you just write some entries in there and then it locks down the estate to that particular thing so even if the underlying system changes from under it it will use that particular artifact with that particular hash from the cache. So it's used extensively, no pun intended, it's used extensively in the extensible estate case, but it has it has uses outside of that as well that we haven't really capitalised on yet. Okay is there a way to overlay a layer.conf file with a bitbake pen like a recipe? Not really no, we've tried not to complicate things by adding conf of a pen to files or something crazy like that so I'm afraid not that's a really easy way of doing that. You can't pretty much do anything in anonymous python for example but there's no mechanism like a bitbake pen and can I give some pros and cons of using pocky directly versus creating a custom distro. To be honest most people want to create their own distro, it sounds a little bit crazy but in the context of your project creating your own distro conf file is fine pocky is a good default you could inherit from it and then just build on top of it that's what pocky tiny does and pocky alt config so there's examples of those there but you can just do that you know create your own distro and then just have nothing in it you can just inherit from pocky and then if you ever need to change anything you have the place and the mechanism to do that so my advice is that yeah pocky is great as a reference distro but inherit from it or create your own that's what the system's designed to be able to handle and is there a reason that the bitbake user manual is not part of the mega manual we're busy changing all the documentation right now over from docbook to Sphinx so I think that the bitbake manual will be included in the new equivalent of the mega manual in the new setup if it's not remind us and we'll see what we can do about that but yeah the move to Sphinx means that the documentation is a lot more accessible for people that make changes to and develop so hopefully that should be one of the advantages of it so I think I'm probably running out of time I'm not entirely sure how I see that in here but I guess to wrap up what I will say is that if anybody does have any more questions I've not quite got to some of the ones at the end there please do find me in the conference system and I'm quite happy to try and answer those and you know so please come find me of there is a doctor project slack channel that's accessible through the booth come find us there you'll find people who can answer a lot of questions about the project from there but yeah thanks everyone


Hello, in today's video I'm going to be sharing with you the most amazing, the easiest minced meat pie filling recipe ever. Traditionally minced meat that's used for Christmas minced pies is a mixture of chopped dried fruit with some sort of vegetable fat like vegetable suet. This tends to cause some indigestion but my recipe that I am sharing with you today is quite unique in the fact that it uses a large amount of cooking apples which gives it that nice pulpy look so you are eliminating the fat that can cause indigestion. I have to give you a warning though at this point that the minced pies that you'll make using this filling are so moreish that you will probably keep on eating them non-stop so you have been warned. The minced meat itself you can eat it straight after you've made it but really it tastes a lot better when you let it mature for at least a year then it is banging. You will need some bramley cooking apples, you're gonna need some sultanas, you could use raisins if you want to or currants, optional but not necessary. Glace cherries, light brown sugar, a lemon, mixed spice, cinnamon, Captain Morgan's rum or brandy. Depending on what tickles your fancy. We'll also need a bottle of cider this is our own homemade cider that we're using. Done the equipment includes a peeler, chopping board, scales and a huge stockpot to boil your minced meat in. You'll also want to gather together your bottles that you're actually going to be using for the jarring. I reuse old glass jars from things that I have bought. Make sure that your glass jars have got a wide mouth it makes life a lot easier. First step is to peel and core those apples. We're gonna remove the apple peel. You may want to save your apple peel for the compost bin or to make your very own apple cider vinegar. I've included this section in case you've never cored and peeled any apples before and to also give you an idea of what size of apple chunks you are going for. Of course you can make the apple chunks a little bit thicker if you want to but bear in mind that this will affect the texture of the mince meat. It will still be delicious it's just that you may have thicker chunks of pulpy apple. So that's kind of the size that we're going for in order to recreate the mince pies in this video. Life is so much easier whenever you're cooking something when you can gather all of your ingredients and prepare them together before you start the cooking. So for this tutorial I'm actually preparing every single ingredient before I start cooking it. The next thing is to do the apple, the lemon zest. So with lemon zest I prefer actually using the handheld zest I wish creates this lovely little curls of lemon zest. We're gonna slice up sage lemon, squish it, squish the jinkers out of it to get the lemon juice.  You're optional but not necessary extra cherries just get those out and basically dice them as thick as you can bear them.  So we're now actually ready to do some cooking so you want to pop open your bottle of cider, measure it out and then you're gonna take it over to the stock pot to get started. The first step is to melt to dissolve the sugar within the cider itself.  So medium heat is recommended until you can no longer see the sugar crystals. This is where using soft brown sugar comes in handy because it does have a tendency to dissolve a heck of a lot quicker than say for instance demerara. Apart from the fact that soft brown sugar in all of my years of making this recipe is the best one for imparting the best flavor. So that's what it would look like once everything has melted. You should have a nice lovely foam on the top and you're just gonna bung everything in except for the alcohol which will give you time to have a little bit of a tipple. First thing to go in is the apple. So we're gonna let the apples sit in there for about five minutes. Just enough time for it to absorb some of the cider. Now the fun part begins. Once we've had the five minutes for the apple to absorb we're going to add some cinnamon and mixed spice and whatever else really tickles your fancy but for me this is the ultimate one. So we're gonna do a teaspoon of the cinnamon and a teaspoon of the mixed spice and we're just gonna mix it in there. Add in the optional but not necessary cherries followed by the lemon with the lemon zest in there and just stir it in. You're just gonna make one big lovely mash and by this point it does smell really delicious. The quintessential smell of Christmas.  Be careful not to splash any of that hot fluid on you. Mix it all until everything has been coated in the fluid and that's it. You just leave it now to bubble away for about a half an hour whilst it simmers and pulps and the apple gets really nice and pulpy. Eventually it will absorb the brown color of the soft brown sugar and the cider and it will get to a point where you won't be able to distinguish the apple itself and they should take between 30 to 45 minutes on a medium heat. We don't want it boiling because if it boils you risk scorching it at the bottom of your pan. Keep it on a medium heat and keep on stirring all the time to ensure that it doesn't burn. I forgot to collect the footage showing me actually adding the brandy into this mix so I went with the brandy because I think it creates a better flavor that way and I used a half a cup of brandy in there. So once you've prepared your jars by sterilizing them whether that's in boiling water or in the oven, my preferred choice is the oven, you are going to put your nice warm lovely juicy mints meat into the jar and a little piece of baking parchment or wax paper goes a long way towards keeping them nice and fresh. Pop the lid on and make sure you tighten it. Let it sit on that cooling rack for a while until you hear this lovely popping sound which signifies that the vacuum seal has been created. As I mentioned in the beginning these taste amazing if you let them mature for a while. If possible try and make them a couple of months beforehand. They'll still taste good but give them time and they will taste even better. Always label your jars. I can't tell you how many times I forgot to label them and I have paid the price so make sure you label your jar of mints meat and then once you've labeled them if you are going to keep them in storage you want to keep them out of direct sunlight in a nice cool dark place. In our case it's the basement in our cupboard of all the preserves that we make in all of the Chinese. That's it guys that's how to make these simple and easy to make mints meat filling. Now you may go forth and make yourself some delicious mints pies. You can make them small or large put star topped pastry on them whichever way you go with it but I do guarantee you that you will be making more than one jar and eating it all up. Thanks ever so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed the video. Please do like and subscribe. Bye!


We've seen already several examples of computing antiderivatives aka indefinite integrals using this technique of u-substitution What I want to do now is change directions a little bit and look at Definite integrals and see how u-substitution can help us in that regard So if we want to integrate from 0 to 5 x times the square root of x or 25 minus x squared dx How could one go about doing this well for for any problem with? Involving indefinite integral or sorry involving definite integrals you always start off by just approaching as a indefinite problem, right? So we want to integrate x times 20 the square root of 25 minus x squared dx And this is basically because of the fundamental theorem calculus We can compute the area of the curve using antiderivatives And so when you look at this And to go right here, uh, we are inclined to try to use some type of u-substitution We take u to be 25 minus x squared in which case then du Equals negative 2x dx. Uh, we have the x right here. We have the dx right here We need a negative 2 so make sure you divide by negative 2 right there And so then our integral would look something like negative one half The integral of u to the one half power because the square root of 25 minus x squared would give us The the u to the one half power and then the negative 2x dx becomes a du So it becomes something like that there And then continuing on By the power rule for antiderivatives The antiderivative u to the one half becomes u to the three halves. You raise the power by one divide everything by three halves plus a constant Then we see that since you're dividing by two thirds You're going to get the negative one half, but then you're going to if you divide by sorry Do you divide by three halves? You should times by two thirds like that the one the two should cancel u to the three halves plus a constant And so then in the end you get this antiderivative of negative one half I guess actually negative one sixth Uh that nope the two's cancelled out negative one third is what we get there And then u was 25 minus x squared Three halves plus a constant. So this gives us our antiderivative Sorry that gives us our antiderivative there uh, and so Then to evaluate the indefinite integral, right? We're going from zero to five x times the square root of 25 minus x squared dx Well, what we need to do is find an antiderivative which what we have one now We're going to get negative one third 25 minus x squared Three halves We evaluate it from zero to five. You don't have to worry about the constant with you do these definite integrals here and so when we plug in The five and the zero we end up with a negative one third We get 25 minus well five squared is 25 uh raised to the three halves and then we subtract from that 25 minus zero square which is zero three halves there And so notice 25 take away 25 is zero So you get zero to the three halves, of course, it's just zero and then you're going to get 25 to the three halves When dealing with these rational exponents, I usually like to take the radicals first the one half power so the one half power of So when you look at this the one half power of 25 will give you a five so you get five cubed, uh, which is going to be 125 And so we end up with negative one third times negative 125 Which would then simplify to become 125 over three Which is the area under this curve right here And so this is a perfectly acceptable way of computing These antiderivatives that is calculating these indefinite integrals. Sorry definite integrals. That's what we're working on right now What I want to do is actually approach this problem from a second perspective. So if we were to do the remake Of this problem right here, we're going from zero to five x times the square root of 25 minus x squared dx like so What if we don't bother with the indefinite integral first could we sort of start with the With the definite integral because after all we still get this u substitution We had before we could do u equals 25 minus x squared and then du Would equal negative 2x dx And so we're still in a position where we can have a negative one half in front and a negative two right there Uh, but the issue that I want to address is what can you do with these right here? Because after all when you look at the limits here the bounds of the integral These are x coordinates when x equals zero and x equals four these could potentially be adapted as well and By adapting them can we turn can we change the bounds to be Into the variable x instead because if I can you sort of use the following analogy as we're looking for areas under the curve Right, we've been mostly focused with this approach where we're trying to find the area into the curve using rectangles We use rectangles to find the area of the curve and by taking you know Sufficiently small rectangles. We can do a pretty good job with that. But why do we have to use rectangles? Why couldn't we not use something that maybe fits the curve a little bit better? And we've seen this example where using trapezoids Can actually be a much better approach To finding the area under the curve That is one of there's a slant to it Uh, that is if we switch up the shape we don't have to use rectangles at time And this u substitution Technique in some regards the change of the variable is like changing the shape that the original problem started off with Rectangles, but why not switch to trapezoids or why not switch to circles or parabolas things that might fit better under the curve? and so Because of this relationship u equals 25 minus x squared we could think of this as a function relationship What happens when x equals five? What happens when x equals zero well when x equals five and we plug this into the function u would equal 25 minus Five squared Which if we simplify that we end up with 25 minus 25 which equals zero And then likewise what is u when x is zero so u minus u equals 25 minus zero squared here This would be 25 minus zero which is equal to 25 And so if we approach the integral with this perspective the original integral Negative one half the integral from zero to five Of negative two x times the square root of 25 x squared dx We could switch the limits of the integral when we switch the variable So the negative two x dx that just becomes a du and the square root of 25 minus x squared That becomes u to the one half power But then if we change the limits when u equals Sorry when x equals zero u will equal 25 and when x equals five u will equal Zero and so we can change the balance and so now we have a simpler A simpler definite integral here Because after all if we're looking for the integral the definite integral This is the area into the curve the area of the curve is not a function It is a number we're trying to find a number And the fundamental theorem of calculus says we can find an antiderivative to help us find that number But our goal is not to find the definite integral the goal is to find this number Now here if you don't like that the 25 is on the bottom you can switch the order This is something we do all the time But if you switch the order of the limits you have to negate it And that's actually great because we have this negative sign that's already in front So it's like oh, that's a win-win situation for me So you're going to get one half the integral from zero to 25 Of u to the one half du And then the antiderivative like we kind of similar to what we saw before the antiderivative You'll take one to the power so that gives you three halves. You'll times it by two-thirds There was already a two right there. There was a one-half in front. Sorry, so When you take one half times two-thirds you end up with one-third And then you evaluate this from zero to 25 Plug it in zero will give you zero plug in in 25 will give you 125 so you have one-third 25 To the two-thirds. Sorry three halves Minus is zero to the three halves and you end up and again with the exact same number 125 over three So the technique doesn't change. I should say the answer doesn't change based upon the technique But we have these two different approaches We can find the antiderivative in terms of x and then plug those in in terms of x or We can turn away from x face towards this new variable u and then solve the problem with you Either approach is quite successful And in fact, I'm a big fan of this second approach as as a person who somehow missed this the first time I saw it probably I probably just didn't understand what my professor was talking about the first time I saw this type of problem in cacus and so these numbers sort of mysteriously changed from zero to five to 25 and zero and so for A good long time I would do the first approach and then like in cacus three I finally figured out what my professor was doing Honestly, I should was the goober who should just ask the question But I was too embarrassed to do so don't don't be like me right you should if you have a question You should ask ask right Either if you're in a class ask your question If you're watching this video post the comment ask your question So you don't get trapped in some misinformation for a long time But once I finally figured out how this this change of limits worked out. I love this new one over here. It's my favorite It's so nice to switch these variables and the more and more we do with these things The more and more you're gonna see that switching these variables is a good friend of ours Let's like a look at another one of these let's Integrate from one to e the natural log of x over x dx and you might wonder why would e be my upper bound But for this function that's actually quite generous Now in this situation, we're looking for a function whose derivative is present in the integrand And we might be interested in selecting the bottom But if you just set u equal to x that really doesn't do you a lick of good here Instead, let's actually choose u to be the natural log of x If we take u to be the natural log of x then its derivative is equal to 1 over x dx And you'll see that's exactly what we have in this integral We can take the integral here the natural log becomes a u and then the dx over x becomes a du So we're almost there except there are these bounds here. How did the limits change?  You don't want to do that Instead look forward switch to your new variables and just go from there Bye everyone. We'll talk some more about this next time. See you


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Now TechSoup connects nonprofits, charities, libraries, and foundations with tech products and services as well as information so that you can make informed decisions about technology. TechSoup has been around since 1987 and since then has distributed over 11 million technology donations to over 200,000 nonprofit organizations. In addition to offering products including the latest versions of software like Microsoft Windows and QuickBooks, TechSoup also offers consulting services. For more information about TechSoup products and services, please visit us online at techsoup.org and click on Get Products and Services. You can also subscribe to the TechSoup newsletter to stay up to date on webinars, tech information, and new products and services available through TechSoup. With that, I'd like to welcome you once again to today's TechSoup webinar, Help Youth Find a Free Neal This Summer. Summer Hunger is a serious issue affecting youth in our communities, and we are here to give you some tips on how to help get more youth fed this summer while school is out. My name is Crystal Schimpf, and I will be your host for today's webinar. And I'm joined by three guests who will be sharing information about the Summer Meals program and ways you can help more youth find summer meals in your area. Patrice Chamberlain is the director of the California Summer Meal Coalition, which is a statewide collaborative effort dedicated to fighting youth hunger. Patrice will give us an overview of the Federal Summer Food Service program and summer meals in California. Michael Cox is the director of public services at the Pueblo City County Library District in Pueblo, Colorado. Michael is going to tell us how his library district helps youth find summer meals, both as a meal site and also as a referral agency. Last but not least, Marnie Webb is the CEO of Caravan Studios, which is a division of TechSoup Global. Caravan uses a collaborative approach to solving community problems using technology, and recently launched the range app which helps locate summer meal sites. Marnie is going to tell us about several technology tools including range that can be used to help connect youth with summer meals. Assisting us with chat, we have several folks from the TechSoup and Caravan teams. Becky Wiegen, Sarah Washburn, and Anna Jaeger, who will be keeping track of your questions and joining you in the conversation. On Twitter, we have Ginny Meese under the TechSoup4Libes handle. And if you are on Twitter today, be sure to use the hashtag TechSoup to be involved in the conversation there. Today, we will be taking a broad look at the Summer Meal Program starting off with a brief discussion of what it is and why it is important. We will take a look at an example of how the Summer Meal Program integrates into library programming and how it can be promoted through library services. We will look at several tools available to help find summer meal sites and talk about what you can do to help youth in your community. Our focus today is really on how to help get youth fed, regardless of whether or not your organization provides those meals directly. This is about ways we can make information available and make referrals. And I hope that you all walk away with a few new ways to help youth in your community this summer. Please remember to submit any questions and comments in the chat throughout the webinar. We'll have time for questions and answers at the end, and we'll get to as many questions as we can during the webinar. We will follow up with you via email if we run out of time and your question was not answered. Your chat comments will come to us as presenters, but we'll share them back out with the entire group. Also, just a reminder that this webinar will be archived and sent to you via email after the webinar is completed.  So in this poll that you see on your screen, or you should be seeing on your screen, tell us what your level of knowledge is about the Summer Meal Program and about summer hunger issues in general. To respond to the poll, simply select the radio button next to the response that best fits. Are you an expert when it comes to summer meals? Do you have a fair amount of working knowledge about the program, or are you a novice here to learn? I'll give you a few seconds to respond to this poll, and you get a chance to really think about it, and just pick the answer that represents you the best. I'll give you a few more seconds. I can still see that responses are coming in, and I can see already that the majority are definitely new to the Summer Meals Program and are here to learn today, which is great. You have come to the right place. So I'm going to give just a count down here. We'll close the poll in 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1. So now you should be able to see the results, and we can see that many of us are here to learn. Now I'm sure you have many other experiences involving youth and programming that you'll be able to relate to this information to today and think about how you can help with the Summer Meal Program. Now for those of you who are experts or who have a fair amount of information, please share your ideas and your experiences in the chat.  Now another thing we'd like to know is how you have been involved in Summer Meal Programs in the past. And in this one, you can actually select multiple responses to select all that apply. And this is looking at the past. So in years past 2013 or earlier, have you served meals at your site? Have you referred youth to other meal sites? Is this your first time getting involved? Or if you're selecting other, tell us in the chat what it is you've done to be involved in Summer Meals in the past. And then we will put that out to the rest of the group. I know some of you may be involved for the first time this year, and that's okay, we're really just looking at the past today. And this helps us know what your level of current experience is. So yeah, if you have other experiences, tell us in the chat, and we will share it back out with everyone. And it looks like the responses are slowing down here as well. So I'm going to give another little countdown to close the poll, 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1. We'll close the poll. And again, we see a lot of first-time involvement which makes sense based on the last question. Some of you have done other types of involvement, so hopefully we'll get to see some of your ideas as well.  And hopefully these tools we share with you today will give you some greater ideas on how to continue that service and improve on it. And so thank you for telling us a little bit about yourself. And now I'm going to have Marnie tell us why Summer Meals are so important, and introduce this topic to all of us. Marnie? Hi, thank you for the introduction, and hello everyone. So as Crystal explained a little bit in the opening, we at Caravan Studios have become engaged with the issue of Summer Meals. And Patrice Chamberlain is going to describe this just a little bit in more detail, but we did want to share with you the problem that first brought us into this issue area. We do community events called Generators where we work with food rescue organizations. And we also interviewed and talked to county officials and librarians in the state of California. And we learned what was to us this startling fact that for every six youth that take advantage of federally funded lunch programs during the school year, only one of them is accessing Summer Meals. I mean five of those kids are facing food insecurity during the summer. And that food insecurity leads to a greater summer learning loss. And those youth gain weight two to three times as fast during the summer months. So we put that information together with this huge number of kids that weren't accessing the Summer Meals and the impacts of that food insecurity on their academics and on their health. And so we started asking ourselves as a team, how can we increase access to Summer Meals? And as part of asking ourselves that question, we also talked to people, Patrice Chamberlain among them, who gave us more insight into what it's like for these youth that are seeking Summer Meals and what the Summer Meals programs are like. And with that I'll hand it off to you Patrice. Patrice Thanks, Marnie. So as Marnie pointed out, there is a real disconnect between what's happening during the school year and what's happening in the summer. So what I'm hoping to do is expand a little bit on what's happening during the summer and how USDA Summer Meal programs provide an opportunity to really help build a summer safety net for kids in your community. It's really more than just a meal. We're really talking about pooling together resources and building partnerships to create that infrastructure in the summer. So what's happening when school is out? So you know it's safe to say that when school is out for the summer that the kids that are getting free and reduced price lunch during the school year that need doesn't magically disappear during the summer. And along with that, food insecurity has consequences related to the children's development, their cognitive, behavioral, and physical development. So I'm really looking at both the individual consequences but knowing that that ultimately is going to have longer-term impacts on the well-being and prosperity of our communities. So in addition to those individual impacts, it's harder for low-income families to make ends meet during the summer. Without access to the school lunch program it's difficult for families to offset those costs that they were able to during the school year. So the National Organization Chair of Strength last year conducted a survey of low-income parents and found that almost 40% had a harder time making ends meet during the summer. And that 34% of those families actually did not have enough food during the summer. So this is a really real problem that we're dealing with. So as Marnie indicated earlier, it really creates a potential perfect storm of bad outcomes. We have the food insecurity piece. We have increased risk of childhood obesity. As Marnie said, kids can gain weight two to three times faster during the summer than during the school year, which makes it more difficult for that weight to come off during the school year. In addition, without kind of taking a holistic approach to promoting nutrition that includes summer, we're also looking at how this can undermine the nutrition promotion efforts that are happening during the school year. So kids are year-round beings, so we really need to look at promoting healthy habits year-round as we work to create a healthier next generation. In addition to these health outcomes there's also the impact of the summer learning loss. As many of you probably know whether you're working in a nonprofit or in a library, that summer learning loss can have a really big impact on low-income kids. The National Summer Learning Association reports that low-income kids not only are losing the grade level math skills that other kids are experiencing, they're also experiencing a higher rate of reading skills, loss in reading skills as well. And what this means is that there's the additional cost of reteaching in the fall and the cumulative impact that that has on the achievement gap. So summer presents a real opportunity for us to address both the health and the learning impact on kids. So USDA summer nutrition programs provide a really amazing opportunity, I think, to do this. And I'm going to just provide a really, really basic overview of the program. And I know that Crystal will share out more specific details after the webinar. So the U.S. Department of Agriculture offers summer nutrition programs. You may have heard of it referred to as the summer food service program or the seamless summer feeding option. And that's just part of the school lunch program. And basically the idea is to help ensure that low-income kids have access to a healthy meal during the summer just to eliminate that gap that can happen when school closes. And typically these meals are served in low incomes that have a high population of low-income kids. But the benefit, too, is that all kids in the neighborhood can have a lunch. So there's no ID required or documentation. So it's a great opportunity to ensure that all kids have access to a healthy meal without any kind of stigma. And just to introduce you to a couple of terms that I might refer to, the sponsor is the agency that acts as the administrative agent. A lot of times it's the school district. It could also be a nonprofit such as a food bank or church, too. And then the site is the place where the meals are actually served. So it could be a library. It could be a Boys and Girls Club. There's a lot of opportunities as to where the meals are being served. And the general premise is that they should be in areas that are serving a high population of low-income kids. So I think in the simplest sense, summer meals are so great because we know that food brings people together. And I'm sure that in many of your communities, your agencies and your cities and counties have been hit hard by budget cuts. So summer meal programs really provide a great opportunity to bring community partners together to really identify who has what to bring to the proverbial table. And as you can see here, I've created just this short list of who you can help bring to the table ranging from schools and food banks to healthcare practitioners. There really is no end to who can be brought to the table to really kind of see what kind of creative endeavors can be developed to support youth in your community. And just to give you a few brief examples from here in California, in Bakersfield, the school district worked with its nutrition services, worked with its academic department to develop summer learning materials that were distributed to kids before they left for the summer. And then they were encouraged to come to the school cafeterias during the summer, which were nice, air-conditioned learning labs that had access to tutors and computers, along with a free healthy breakfast and lunch. In the Bay Area, we had the YMCA working with residents from Stanford Medical School to really connect the health and healthcare piece and help jointly operate a summer meal program. In the Redwood Empire Food Bank, they do a lot around nutrition education. So in addition to providing summer meals, they were also able to really work with kids and their families to learn about gardening and how to develop healthy habits at home. One of the projects that I'm just going to briefly touch on that I'm really excited about that we've been working on in California is our Lunch at the Library project. So what that is, is we developed the California Summer Meal Coalition, developed a statewide partnership with the California Library Association with the support of the David and Lucille Packard Foundation. And really what we wanted to do was identify how we could bring together public library summer reading and other programs with the summer meals. So we worked with various communities throughout California to partner, to create different models of how we could bridge that summer learning and summer nutrition gap. And we had really great success. We started with just a few libraries in 2013 and now we will be working with 45 libraries in California. And I bring this up really as just an example of how we can create these summer safety nets to ensure that kids are healthy and engaged in summer and that that gap doesn't happen. And we will have, right now we are developing an online clearinghouse of information that can help libraries that are interested in either becoming summer meal sites or really working as a promotional partner. And one of the things that I really wanted to mention in bringing up this example is that there are a lot of different ways to create partnerships either in bringing programming to summer meal sites or acting as a promotional partner. And I think that's one of the ways that all of you can get involved is really thinking about how you can either partner with summer meal providers or how you can help promote them because we really have a great need for trusted messengers to help get the word out about summer meal programs. So here is my contact information and I am happy to help provide more information on either libraries and how they can get involved in summer meal programs. I noticed that one of you in the chat indicated you were looking for information that might be able to help sway your director. And I think one of the important keys to remember about summer meal programs is that this is a real opportunity to help support your agency's goals as well. It's really not just about serving meals. It's about working collaboratively with community partners.  But again I hope you all are happy to reach out to me and I'm happy to help in any way that I can. Great. Thank you so much Patrice. I mean that just gives us a really good overview of the summer meal program and the summer food service program, especially for those on the call. This is new information for them and certainly sets the stage for what we are about to talk about. And I love the way you talk about the different types of programs that may be integrated into the meal service. And so one thing that we actually want to think about is where might we reach kids in the summer, whether it's for providing the meals or providing information about the meals. And so I actually have another poll up for everybody and I'd like to see where in your community do you think kids are hanging out when school is out? And you can check as many of these options as are applicable to your situation. Is it a church community space or a daycare? Are kids just hanging out at home? Or do they go to the library or a park? Are they in school actually during the summer or some type of summer learning program? What about YMCA's or rec center's, Boys and Girls Club, that sort of thing. And then again if it's other, share in the chat exactly what it is that you think they are doing that doesn't apply on this list. Or maybe you've got a really specific example because we'd like to hear that too. And if you're not sure, that's okay. And I know some of you maybe are representing your entire state or you're here as an individual and this may not be a question that's easy for you to answer and so that's okay if you don't know as well. I see lots of answers coming in and I'll close the poll in just a minute. It looks like it's slowing down so I'll do the countdown. 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1. And we'll close that poll. Well now you can see everybody's responses. So it looks like definitely the library and the parks stand out on top. I know we have lots of libraries here today so that's a great place to get information out to kids. And if you are a meal site as well then even better, lots of activity at the YMCA's and rec center's and also at home. So those are some of our biggest categories and you kind of see the spread there. So I know there are many places we find kids in the summer and this just really gives us a lot to think about. Now Patrice also mentioned some of the different things happening at libraries in California this summer and the lunch at the library program. Well now we're going to hear from Michael who is at the Pueblo City County Library District in Pueblo, Colorado. And he's going to talk about how they have been reaching youth in their community both within the library and outside of the library. They are both a meal program site and a referral agency and they are working on ways to increase staff training when it comes to making referrals to other meal sites. Michael? Crystal, thank you very much. So I will be talking about how the Pueblo City County Library District got involved with Summer Meals and some of the benefits that we have realized from this partnership. I'll share some concerns that staff have voiced to me which demonstrate a need for more awareness about access to Summer Meals. And I'll end by sharing how we are planning to better focus our efforts towards our role as a referral agency. Our introduction to the Summer Meal program came with our outreach department. Years ago we developed a program called Satellite Libraries. These are locations within existing libraries, often school libraries, in which the public library adds supplemental collections to provide access to materials for all ages and interests. And of course we also provide other typical library programs such as story times and other programs. Many of these school locations were Summer Meal sites and we were surprised to learn that even when the school year ends, school lunches may continue. We began partnering with the Summer School Lunch Program meaning we just altered our program times as a way to build capacity of people participating in our own library programs and it was successful. Then about 10 years ago we initiated a seasonal program in the summer called Books in the Park. Books in the Park allows us to more directly reach our target audience of families often of lower socioeconomic status who may not otherwise utilize library services. This may be because they are unable to travel to our brick and mortar locations or possibly because of the institutional nature of a library building just may be intimidating. Seeing our Books in the Park program as an entry point for people to begin using the library services more fully, we changed the services a bit. We removed many of the barriers to use that our more traditional library locations have. So no library card account is required. Books circulate on an honor system so there are no fines. Shoes and shirts are not required at our Books in the Park and you are welcome to run and make noise. Really what I found is that Books in the Park naturally emphasizes the fun interest-driven model of engaging reading that public libraries do so well. As we began to develop the Parks program we were able to build several new partnerships. The City Parks and Recreation Department of course, YMCA has started providing programming at our locations. Community advocates such as politicians and PV personalities, they all jump at the chance to read stories with children at these locations. This is a fun, engaging way to participate in the summer. We were surprised to be approached by the School Summer Meals program suggesting that we begin providing summer meals at our locations in the parks. Because we already had this existing relationship with the program we had seen it functioning kind of alongside of our services. We quickly said yes. And this is largely because we knew that library with staff really would not be required to take on much work at all. So here are the summer meals. Being a service point for summer meals really takes very little staff time. Each morning we communicate a prediction of how many meals we need and this can vary greatly. Sometimes neighborhoods put together some events and we know that many more people will be participating that day. So we phone in how many meals we think we'll need that day. And if we're off the meal sites will bring more food in. The food is then prepared in an approved kitchen usually within an area of school in our case. And that staff then delivers it to our site. They serve the food. And all we are required to do is to provide access to hand washing and disposal of trash. Easy enough. Staff are required to take a brief online training about food safety. And what we get back is of tremendous value for our own goals as well as for our customers as well. It's clear to us that many people show up to our parks in order to take advantage of these free meals. So we've planned programs again to coordinate with our meal times in order to increase that program attendance. We know that schools are sending home flyers listing all of the community summer meal sites. And the great incentive of a meal along with the marketing from schools is a real win for our parks program. Last year we served 3,000 people over the eight weeks of the program. Staff serving youth have told me that some youth seem to spend all day at the library. Sometimes asking people for money to purchase food from vending machines or telling staff, I'm hungry. So our staff are aware of the need. But unaware that free meals are available throughout the community, staff have sometimes resorted to personally providing food that's happened. Or they've consulted with me about whether or not it's time to get the Department of Social Services involved. And summer meals is a great solution. So learning about resources to find free meals has been a great solution for staff worried about the well-being of hungry youth. We've had one instance when a young customer came to a program that involved using food to build a diorama. We were playing with our food. We were building stuff. And this young customer requested that they eat the food and they didn't really want to participate in the building piece of the program. And this really highlighted to us that there is a need for library staff to be more familiar with information resources regarding free meals. So in preparing for this presentation, I learned a lot. I learned that a few staff outside of those working directly with our books in the park locations or our satellite library locations, a few staff are really aware of the summer meal service being provided. So this year we have a few actions planned in order to step up our ability to become a successful referral agency. First, we plan to be prepared to distribute paper flyers, the same paper flyers that the schools are distributing, listing the area summer meal locations. And I do want to note that of course the big disadvantage of paper is that paper is inevitably immediately out of date. The plethora of flyers is that they can stand as a physical reminder for staff to share the information and they can also serve as invitations for customers to inquire or to ask more questions. So if we've just got these out and about the library they can come and ask us more questions. Each year all staff are given a brief training about summer reading program activities. And summer meals are being added to the training this year. So the training will include resources that are kept up to date such as hunger.org and an app called Range which I know you'll be hearing more about. Both of these provide access to all of the available information about local meal locations. We're also working to bring more resources into our park locations to share online access to this information. So in order to provide a hands-on experience with information available online we're going to be bringing a hotspot to the parks. We'll be bringing a laptop and an iPad. So staff will be able to both demonstrate these resources and also help our customers find the resources on their own devices. So that staff will be prepared to provide many tech trainings surrounding the use of the Range app and other online resources. One interesting problem of bringing technology to our parks as we've been thinking this through just from our past experiences is the need to keep our devices cool as the temperatures rise. So we're planning on filling a cooler with ice and creating a barrier there so that if our devices begin to overheat we can throw those in the cooler and get them ready to keep rolling. There's a discussion now to bring summer meals to all of our library locations in the future. Our experience has been nothing but positive and in fact we've learned some things about some of our own food programs and some of the regulations that we really should be following. What we know is that food brings people together. Stories and reading can then build experiences and grow knowledge. And it has been said to feed the mind, start with the stomach. So to find our next eager readers perhaps we can start by recommending a nice place to find a warm meal this summer. With that I know that I'll be passing on the presentation. Great. Thank you Michael. And that really is, it shows us a great example of how a library can be involved. In your case you are involved with the actual summer meal sites but you can also be involved in just helping families and children connect to meals. So thank you for sharing that with us. So now we're going to move on to have Marni tell us how several tools, to tell us about several tools that are available to help make referrals to summer meal sites. And she will tell us also some of the ways that you can help in your community. Marni? Thank you. So you heard about the issue of summertime meals for youth and making sure they have continuous access to food. I love Patrice's comment that kids are year-round beings and they need to eat during the summertime too. And you've heard about what one library is doing to engage not just by feeding meals but by engaging their librarians in giving solid referrals to other meal sites throughout their area. So what I'd like to talk about now are three different solutions that you can use to help make solid referrals in your community to youth who are seeking summertime meals. The first is one Michael mentioned is a website called Y. They run the National Hunger Hotline and they have a database that you can access through any web browser that helps you find food. You see what the database entry form looks like here on this page. It allows you to put in an organization name, an address, even just your state or your zip code, and to by hitting the summer meals with a blue arrow just appeared next to it. For search, you'll see those summer meal locations. Interestingly, I took some of the places you all said that youth hung out during the summer. You mentioned that they hung out at home. I put in both apartments into the search bar just to see nationwide how many sites had the word apartment in the title. 1,865 sites so far have signed up to serve summertime meals at apartments. There are 253 libraries serving summertime meals at this point. 192 mobile home parks and 68 pools. And this is with just the states that are reporting at this point. We aren't yet into summer so states are still submitting their summer meal sites to Y Hunger so more organizations go into that database every day. When I looked up libraries two weeks ago, for example, they were 172. And just a few minutes ago, they were 253. So those numbers that I just said are going to go up. So food is all over and it is in places we may not think of as normal food sites. Also on the Y Hunger website you can find some flyers that you can download and you can post in your library. These are great as Michael said because they promote awareness. They don't have the information on them that gets old or changes. These include the Y Hunger hotline. The wonderful thing about people, families calling the hotline is that they have somebody that may answer their questions about summer meal sites but help meet the other nutritional needs of the family as well, not just those summer meals for youth. So it is a terrific resource to make available but also just to build awareness that there is help in the community. An organization called Share Our Strength runs a campaign, No Kid Hungry. And they are working hard to help kids do what they call save summer by making sure that communities rather save summer, by making sure that kids that are facing hunger have appropriate access to meals. And one of the tools that they make available is a text message service. You simply text the word food to 877-877 and you get back a response that asks you for your address. You will see in this instance when I was doing it I just replied with a city and state name and I got summer meal locations back. As you can see I was using a smart phone whenever I did this but you could do it from a feature phone as well, anything that you can text from. You can text and get locations. This again is a wonderful resource to make available. I want to emphasize as you go in and start to test and play with these tools that we are showing you that you may look at a state and you may find that there are very few summer meals available. Two or five. Well it is simply because that state hasn't submitted all of the summer meal sites yet. So that information comes in between now and approximately June 15th. So again those numbers just increase. The other thing that I want to emphasize is the sites change locations over the course of the summer. So a site may only be open in the month of July or it may only be open in August. They may be open for two weeks and find out that they need to adjust their hours or change their location because they aren't reaching the use that they wanted to reach. That is one of the reasons that you should go back and check these often to make sure the information you have and you are using is current. The last tool I'm going to show you is the one that we developed with help from people like Patrice and Michael called Range. Range is a mobile app that works on a smartphone and allows you to locate the nearest place where youth can get a free summertime meal. And it looks the way you expect an app like this to look. Whenever you open your browser it figures out where you are or open the app on your phone it figures out where you are and gives you nearby meal locations. They are just shown with a pin the way that you are looking at what you are looking at now. And then you can tap on any one of those pins and you can get a little bit more information whenever we look at Range now. Most of the sites say coming soon because summer hasn't started yet. So even though we may know where the site is they haven't started serving summer meals yet in most places. You can tap on that again and you can get more detail about the site. So it provides a description. In this case we have the starting and end date. We have the days of the week that they are serving and the times that they are serving. So it also gives you an opportunity to get directions or to call. Whenever you are looking at them you can click the little share icon in the description either in the full detail or the small detail and you can start to collect sites and then you can share those sites with somebody else via text message or email. The interface looks like what you see now not your familiar text messaging or email interface and it does that because we use third party tools to share the information out. And that has a couple of advantages. One the text message or email goes to the recipient with a standard email address and text address not your personal phone number or email address. And it keeps the recipient's number from being stored on the phone. So it just provides a little bit of anonymity for both the sender and the receiver. So what do we hope happens as a result of community members engaging with the tools that we were sharing today? Well the first thing that we want to do all of us is just increase the number of low income youth who access summer meals. I will tell you as somebody that was four months ago a newcomer to this issue I was shocked to learn how hard it is for kids and families to find out the places that they need to go to eat. And just the enormous opportunity that we have as community members to share that information. We hope to increase the number of youth who access it by making it exactly easier for people to share their information. We want to increase the amount of accurate referrals within the community. That's why we are reaching out to all of you today to share this information. We are very hopeful that you will engage with these tools and you will share the specific locations of summer meal sites with your community members. And then finally we hope that your engagement increases your knowledge about the summer meals program, allows you to think about different ways you might participate next summer, whether it's bringing programs to summer meal sites, being a summer meal site yourself, or just being more and more prepared to be able to offer good solid recommendations to those in your community. I know that we have said in the chat, and I believe Crystal said at the opening that we will be sharing the resources with all of you after this as well as many of the answers to your questions. But I did want to give you just to show you in here the slide that gives you the link to the specific resources that I mentioned as a part of this. And we really hope that you will help save summer for millions of children by downloading and using these tools, bookmarking them on your computers, your public access computers, and the computers that you use, and printing and posting these flyers so that people know that there are community resources available to them, and these school-age youth don't have to go hungry during the summertime. Great. Thank you, Marnie, for giving us such a thorough overview to those tech tools. And now it is time to do some questions and answers. And we've been getting a few, and I know lots of those answers have been actually coming through in the chat. But before we do questions and answers, I do want to mention that to follow up on what Marnie just said about those resources coming through in an archive email which you'll get within 24 hours of the closing of the webinar today, somebody asked questions about being able to download the app. And it is available in the three app stores for Windows, Google Play, and Apple. And the links to the pages in those app stores will be included in the archive email. So if you're having trouble finding it, that's one way you may be able to find it more easily. Also, I'll just say that if we aren't able to answer your question here on this call, maybe it might take us a little bit more research or we don't have time to get to all of the questions because lots of good ones are coming through, then we will follow up with you via email. And so please do add any questions that you have. Now, I know that one of the questions we got, this is actually a really good one. The emphasis of range and of many of the resources that you just shared, Marnie, are on the Summer Food Service Program for Children. But is there any plan to expand the tech options to all food sites, not just those for children? Do you know of any plans that may exist for that in the future? Sure. The Why Hunger website that I showed you does have a robust series of food sites for adults and children all throughout the nation. And the Hunger Hotline also provides information about other food sites. I don't know of that we can look up and find out any other either mobile or texting options that provide comparable access to other ongoing food sites or food resources so we can find that and follow up with you. I'll be frank, when we started looking at this issue and the big bundle of hunger-related needs in this country, the place where we saw the single biggest deficit and provide the most resource was on this gap that you face during the summertime. And so that's the place that we started our exploration. But we've been learning a lot in this process and hope to be able to package other resources that provide access to information that youth may need for other reasons and that adults may need in terms of food. Great. Well, it's good to know there are at least a few other resources out there that exist currently and there may be some others coming along as the technology improves for that. Now another question that we've been having is how can one become a summer feeding site, a summer meal site? And while that wasn't the emphasis of this webinar today because for many states we're actually right at the deadline right now to join, I will say that in the archive email we are including that information so that you can find out more about who your state contacts are and find out about getting involved if it's too late this year than potentially for next year. And it's good to see that there is interest for people on this call today for getting involved. And Patrice, I just want to ask, is there anything that you want to add to that for those who might be interested in becoming a partner as a meal site in the future? Sorry, it took me a minute to unmute myself. I think I would just recommend connecting with the state agencies that will be provided in the follow-up email that you're sending out. It would probably be your best option as well as connecting with your state anti-hunger advocates. Great. And Patrice, I've got another question for you. I think you might be able to answer this one best. There have been a couple of questions related to how many kids show up at the site or how many kids might be eligible in an area. And I think there is also an underlying question there which is how do you know that you're not sending somebody to a site that isn't going to have enough meals available? What do sites do if they get more kids in a day that they had anticipated? What do they do to meet that need? So to address your first question, as far as predicting participation, it really varies on the site. I think that for an organization like a library they tend to know roughly how many kids that usually come in during the summer so they have a pretty good sense. Largely, it's a bit of a guessing game. So I think initially when summer meal sites, whether they're libraries or some other nonprofit or a park site, it's a little bit of a guessing game. And you really have to kind of ballpark what you had the previous day and adjust your orders. So it can be a challenge. But I think that's partly why libraries make great sizes that they typically have a better sense of how many kids come in during summer and they can do outreach based on that. Like if they have a standard number of kids that come in and that meets the space that they have to feed, they don't have to do a lot of outreach. But yeah, it really does depend and realistically there are days when you may run out of meals. And I think for most summer meal sites families are pretty accepting of hearing, just come back tomorrow. We'll be serving again tomorrow. I think families understand that. But that's kind of part of how the book program works. Great. Thank you. And Michael, do you have anything to add to that? Having been at an actual meal site, do you have any experience on that front? Yeah, I saw somebody here in the chat recently posted that, and this was my experience as well, there have been occasions when we ran out of meals and the staff were able to go back to the kitchen and bring some food back with them. We've never had to turn people away. Maybe we've been lucky, but I agree we were able to predict fairly well how many people to expect, but in those rare occasions when we run out of food, the staff were able to get back to the kitchen and bring some back. Great. Great. So yeah, it sounds like it really depends on the site, but everybody's in the position of doing the best that they can and then adapting as things change. So Michael, we have a question for you about staff training. Now you said that you were going to be doing some staff training and integrating it into your summer reading program training, but what are the specific types of things you might try to train staff on and how might you pass that information on to them? We have people here of all different size organizations, so if you have any tips on how to pass on that information it would be helpful. Sure. Our plan this year is every year about now as we approach summer reading, one of the staff participating in that summer reading program will make it to every department meeting. We talk briefly about how the program works and we're including in that staff training this year information about how to find information about the summer meals so that we can make sure that we can pass that on to customers if they need it. And as I said, sometimes just having those paper flyers around keeps at the top of our mind and at the customer's fingertips and they often will ask us questions based on the types of things that we've got lying around the library as well. I think the biggest element of training for our staff this year is going to be for the staff who are at the park locations ensuring that they're comfortable using the devices and understanding how to identify when we may need to cool them down. We don't have experience there yet, but just ensuring that they're comfortable. The fear is that they're going to be getting questions not just about the range app but all types of questions about the device. So really we're needing to get them comfortable to demonstrate the technologies for other purposes as well. Great, great. So it sounds like you've got a couple of different things up your sleeve. I just also want to refer back to our archive that's going to be coming out. We have several links there that have some frequently asked questions and some other informational sites both that come from the USDA and then also from the Y-Hunger and other sites that we've shared with you. So there will be many resources with additional information there. Now one question that's been asked is, Trina asked, is there a place to find out statistics? And I'm guessing this is about your local area on the number of children that qualify for free or reduced lunches. And so I don't know if, Patrice, if you happen to know of any places where we might find statistics. I think that the easiest way to get that information is to contact your school district, nutrition services department. Usually they'll use school data is the best way to figure out kind of whether or not your agency is located in an eligible area. And you can also use census data as well. And Crystal, we can connect to make sure that that information is in the archive that's sent out. Great, great. Yeah, and I know in this day and age we're so used to being able to just search online and find that information, but sometimes it's actually easier to pick up the phone and call somebody or get in touch with our local contacts because that statistic may not be online. So that's great advice. And can I add one more point to that? So summer meal sites also need to be separated by a certain geographic distance too. So while your agency may fall in an eligible area, it's important to talk with your school district or whomever to make sure that there isn't already a summer meal site nearby. So that's something to think about too when you're looking at eligibility. Great, great. Good advice there as well. And actually we have a question from Sam who asks if non-USDA sponsored sites, I'm imagining meal sites, can those be submitted to the state? And better yet, can they be submitted to these tools like Y-Hunger, these data sets that are being aggregated and used for these amazing tools? Marni, I'm going to pass this one to you. Sure, so Y-Hunger, the USDA doesn't mandate but strongly encourages that all of the states submit their data about summer meal sites to Y-Hunger so that it can be more easily accessed and found. And in fact, last year it was a pretty robust listing of all of the summer meal sites. So that is typically submitted by the state coordinators which differs by the states exactly who and which department that is. And that's part of the follow-up information that we can share. An easy way, you can easily look, search in the Y-Hunger database by simply typing in your state name. And it will give you just a quick glimpse of whether or not the sites have been submitted. If you have a large state, you see only two sites available, then you can trust that your sites haven't yet been submitted by the state coordinator. If you do see a critical mass of summer sites in there, hundreds or thousands of summer meal sites in there, you can look for those in specific communities. And then contact your summer meals coordinator if you feel that some of the sites are missing. An important thing to remember is what, as I said, the sites change location over the course of the summer so you might have, or there might be a summer meal site that's operating in August. It may be a while before that one shows up. Some of the states are pretty good about keeping their data, the site data very accurate. And so they take down old sites and put up new sites. So it does change over the course of the summer. All right, thank you. So I have time for just one more question before we move into our wrap-up. And Marty, I'm going to direct this one to you as well because you just presented us with three tools, but really it's more than that because some of the sites also have the hotline, why hunger has the hotline, and share our strength, no kids hungry has the text tool. And when we're dealing with all of these tools, sometimes it's easy for us, especially if we're in a small organization and we're handling all of this technology and these phone numbers and these websites to make a decision in a moment about what's the best way to use one of these tools. Which tool do you use in a situation to help or for a youth to a meal site or a family to a meal site? And do you have any tips for people just to kind of in the moment decide which tool they should use or how to keep them all on hand and available? Any tips in that area? Sure thing. I think whenever you're in the library and you have access to your desktop computers and the computers that are available for patrons using the why hunger database makes the most sense. It's accessible via a browser. The internet connection is already there. It's easy to segment out the summer meal sites and find directions. You may be able to print from the library so you can print. And Stan, it's probably the easiest tool for a librarian to use to make a referral or help somebody find a place on a public access computer when they're inside the library. And the same may be true in any other kind of organization that has a client that's asking for help. As you probably do have a computer or a laptop at your desk that you can quickly use the why hunger database to find food. I think if you're out in the parks, you're outside of your building helping people, that's when the mobile tools, having those already loaded and ready to go on your phone, your mobile devices, and know how to use them, that's what's going to make the most sense because it keys into where you are. And it is a quick and easy way for you to get the information out of your pocket. So I think those are the two tools that we as community members can best use to find the referral information and then share in the way that's appropriate to the individual that we're talking to in the place where we're at. And if we have our answering questions about people about what resources can they take with them to be able to find the lunch sites on their own, we can refer them to range and to the why hunger database. But I honestly think the two most robust tools in that way are the text messaging service that we shared as a part of this, but also the why hunger hotline because that gives you a person on the other end that helps with more of your needs. And while it can be hard for people to get on the phone with a stranger and ask for help like that, it is very much a resource that can provide them with more than just what they asked for. And point them to resources that they may not know exist. So I think you divide it up by the location out and about. Use a mobile app in your office, in a public location where you have desktop or laptop computers with Internet access. Use a why hunger database. You want to refer the patrons to things, those two are good services but probably the hotline in the text messaging service are the best. Excellent, excellent. That's an excellent breakdown for us to walk away with today. And that leads us right into our wrap up. And so thank you, Marnie, for that great explanation. But as we are about to wrap up, first of all, I'll ask those of you who are still on the line with us to stay on the line because we'll have a survey for you at the end where you can tell us what you thought about today's webinar. And in the meantime, I want you to just think about what did you learn today and what tools are going to be most helpful for you in whatever situation you are in? And then lastly, what is it that you're going to do next? We're all in different positions of power in our organizations or maybe working as individuals. But just think of some of the things you can do. Can you tell youth and their families about summer meal sites? Can you download the range app? Bookmarking that yhunger.org and share our strengths websites. And then most importantly, share this information that you got today with others in your organization or other colleagues you know from other organizations outside of yours, other community partners you may be aware of, other nonprofits and faith-based orgs and libraries. I do hope that you learned a few new things today to take with you and a reminder that that archive email will come out. And in that look for a handout that lists some of the things you can do right now and things you might be able to do next year as well to be helpful in this area. I want to thank all of our speakers today, Marni, Michael, and Patrice for sharing their expertise. And also to those of you assisting on the chat with the many questions that we got in and comments that we got in today. Thanks to ReadyTalk for being a sponsor. And thanks to all of you for joining us. Please stay on the line again to take a brief survey about your experience today which will help us improve our webinar offerings in the future. And have a great day.


hat collegiate tomorrow so let me go grab this pack unless it's actually right here actually I think it's right here let me grab this pack right here actually let me go get some sleeves that I need and then uh like I said that's pretty much it guys yeah I feel like this Philly's might have actually probably gotten better right I don't think they lost anybody did they if anything they just added like Tray Turner and whoever else they signed but yeah I mean it's like if some of those teams that were winning and competing added even a better player or better players then obviously even better for them but obviously the Mets I mean they spent a shit ton of money you know amongst other teams as well so people always gonna mention them alright guys here we go what's up everybody Jason here for jasperyscasebrace.com this is a 5 spot giveaway in the XR team random with this 2019 panini contenders football 1 pack hobby break number 1 so again guys you get a random team here just quick little pack only 6 cards but quick little pack break then uh we randomize the customer names I bought in again and top 5 get into the XR team which number 2 is the last one guys and that's all we have to do to unlock the XR breaks so here's a dice roll let's do the break first randomize customer names teams 1 and a 2 3 times 1 2 3 3 times Nico down to Steven then we got 3 times 1 2 3 3 times insane alright 3 times 3 times and again guys just a quick pack I mean there's an opportunity and a potential huge hit here I mean obviously you know you can never rule that out but more likely than not it might just be just a quick little pack with no hits but the one thing is that I've hit monster hits out of these little pack breaks but you just never know could be a crack dice of any one of these players here there we go doesn't look like much to insert alright well we tried but it's coming from a box so I think we're going to have opportunities of course to get something alright so here we go guys now here we go top 5 guys get into the team random dice roll 4 and a 4 or 2 and a 2 4 times here we go 1 2 3 4 4 times 4 times top 5 are in Nico just missing out but you did grab like 10 spots or so so you have a chance man good luck Steven R you're in Nico you are in Junior you're in Nico in again and Robert Runkle congratulations so top 5 are in to the XR team random now and this was contenders so I'm going to put tenders 1 but again for the customer that didn't get in don't worry guys because since this was a little filler break that was part of the promo you will have a chance to win potentially some money back if we sell out the next filler plus flawless tomorrow which I think is very possible so we go to the promo list team random spots plus fillers are counted towards this promo so I'm going to paste your guys names from this break here and like I said this was a 2019 contenders football one pack RT number one so you guys will have that opportunity so there you go guys so again I appreciate you guys the next ones in the store at 31 we will sell out and break tomorrow most likely appreciate you guys jaspyscasebreak.com alrighty guys well hey this pretty much takes us here guys I mean we started off the day a little slow I get it though everybody was watching the chiefs game Mahomes I'm sure so many people around the world but on that team I bet on that game more than anything so I know people were worried about that game more than anything but I'm happy my Eagles won they dominated and looking forward to see who they play tomorrow but that's pretty much it for me guys I just do Friday Saturdays and Wednesday mornings here so like I said Joe will be back tomorrow at three o'clock I'm pretty sure that flawless and that team random for XR will sell out tomorrow I'm sure we'll also do a Finest tomorrow as well maybe two who knows we'll put into a team random again and then of course we still have more spectra up there NTFERS off the line and I'm sure Nick will post some more basketball potentially other products as well so thank you guys for a great night like I said start off a little slow but we still ended up getting some pretty big breaks done appreciate you guys have a great night