This site breaks down two federal programs that fight child hunger: the National School Lunch Program and the Summer Food Service Program. Data from data.gov was used for this project dating back to the 1960’s. The intended audience for this project ranges from school administrators to parents to voting citizens. These programs have an important impact on children and the future of our communities.
I wanted to tell the important story that this data shows in a time of political upheaval in the US, when many are calling for fewer federal programs and pointing fingers of blame at the underprivileged for their own misfortune. In order to completely tell this story I interviewed an expert at the Hays County Food Bank on the benefits of supplemental food programs for children especially.
To paint a good picture of participation in the National
School Lunch Program over the years and break down the data into something leisurely digestible I had to get creative. To understand how to add interacti
ve functionality to the pie chart I first needed to understand each element in the pie chart and give it a unique identifier so that I could feed new data into the chart html element when the user selects a different year.
Check out the full project here.