Our Grocery Gift Card Program
We target childhood food insecurity.
All year long.
Our approach represents an innovative shift in how we support food-insecure kids.
How our program works
Grocery gift cards act as a bridge that help our agency partners form stronger relationships with their clients while providing families immediate relief from food insecurity. This collaborative approach offers children and parents access to a wide range of wraparound supports that address other serious life stressors associated with inadequate incomes, such as mental health struggles, unemployment, resettlement, unstable housing, high medical expenses, and domestic violence. Grocery gift cards are an effcient tool to build resilience, trust, and community belonging.
How we deliver our program:
We invest your generous donations to obtain grocery gift cards at a discounted rate from the retailers requested most often by our recipients.
Then we collaborate with our frontline agency partners who offer the cards to the families they know need them the most…
…while at the same time they provide critical support to address other complex life challenges.
Families are empowered with the dignity and confidence to shop in their communities for the food that meets their unique needs.
iCAN continually collects feedback from our agency partners and program recipients to ensure we provide the best service possible to achieve the greatest impact on children and families.
Why grocery gift cards work
Empowerment
Families can choose the foods they purchase to meet their unique personal, cultural, religious, and health requirements.
Access
Transporting food hampers poses many challenges. Grocery gift cards enable families to access stores close to home.
efficiency
It’s so much easier for agency partners to expand our reach and impact by distributing grocery gift cards instead of food hampers.
Dignity
Families experience no stigma, shame, or judgment from other people when using grocery gift cards.
The efficiency factor
Free food hampers
There’s a lot that goes on between a donation and getting food to hungry kids. Free food provision is much more impersonal, stigmatizing, and wasteful. It focuses less on relationships and choice, and more on transporting and assembling bulk quantities of food around the city.
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Grocery gift cards
Your contribution quickly empowers families to gain control over their struggles. Our process is driven by direct relationships: you to us, us to agency partners, agency partners to families in need. We’ve built circles of trust that help it all go smoothly.
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Grocery gift cards
Your contribution quickly empowers families to gain control over their struggles. Our process is driven by direct relationships: you to us, us to agency partners, agency partners to families in need. We’ve built circles of trust that help it all go smoothly.
Free food hampers
There’s a lot that goes on between a donation and getting food to hungry kids. Free food provision is much more impersonal, stigmatizing, and wasteful. It focuses less on relationships and choice, and more on transporting and assembling bulk quantities of food around the city.
Together, we’re making a major impact. Since we started providing grocery gift cards in 2020:
34,000+
food-insecure kids supported – while this is a big number, many more need our help.
200+
communities accessed our program through participation in more than 50 unique programs delivered by 23 frontline agency partners.
$3.4m+
in grocery gift cards have been targeted to food-insecure families in greatest need.
My husband lost his job and there is no work for him. Because of our financial situation, there are only a few dollars left after paying all the bills. By accessing support from I Can for Kids, we are now able to purchase fresh fruit and vegetables for our children. It may seem like a small act to you, but to us it can be the difference between food on our table or skipping another meal. Thank you!
Your generous support empowers thousands of families with the dignity and confidence to plan, purchase, and provide fresh and healthy food that meets their kids’ unique needs.Â
None of that can happen without donors like you.