Innermost is proud to partner with The Akshaya Patra Foundation (TAPF) to provide school meals to children in need. For every purchase you make with Innermost, we will donate a meal to a child in need.
Malnutrition accounts for 50% of child deaths within India and 1 in 11 (that's 8.2 million) children are forced into work to earn their food. The Mid-Day Meal Scheme (MDM Scheme) was introduced in India in 1995 as a part of the National Programme of Nutritional Support to Primary Education. Its aim is to enhance academic enrolment, retention and attendance amongst children whilst also improving nationwide nutrition, by ensuring all school-children are given a midday meal. This not only reduces hunger and promotes better nutrition for the children (with a multitude of ongoing future health benefits associated with this), but also improves class focus and learning, reduces school drop out rates and improves academic performance. The end goal is to support children into employment and help them to exit the poverty cycle for good.
The Akshaya Patra Foundation is a non-profit organisation that operates on a public-private partnership (PPP) model to help implement the Mid-Day Meal Scheme, Akshaya Patra’s school lunch programme has grown from feeding 1,500 children in the year 2000 to over 2 million children in 2022. On 11 February 2019, the organisation commemorated the serving of 3 billion meals.
As a brand, we feel it's important to give back to those less fortunate than us. So, for every order we receive, we donate a meal to a child who would otherwise go hungry. When hunger is a barrier to education it also becomes a barrier to social mobility. A child that is not fed can very easily become a teenager that did not learn and in turn an adult that remains in poverty. We care about breaking down these barriers and I'm thankful we have the opportunity to make a change.
We have partnered with The Akshaya Patra Foundation who are the largest non-profit school meal provider in the world, and have won multiple awards. The food they serve is hygienically cooked in their state-of-the-art kitchens and efficiently transported to over 13,000 government schools every day. They rigorously test their food to ensure it is meeting, and exceeding, the nutritional content required – the majority of their dishes are loaded with fresh, seasonal vegetables. For many of their students, school lunch is often the only full, balanced meal they will receive all day as their parents cannot afford to provide them with the food they need to grow healthily.
Shiv (CEO & Founder, Innermost)
To participate in donating, all you need to do is checkout, or purchase a product from any of our stockists. We'll take care of the rest. In the meantime, you can learn more about the program here.
