Downtown Partners Chicago launches ad campaign to spotlight student hunger
By Lewis Lazare, Chicago Business Journal
NOVEMBER 20, 2014 — The holidays are one of the most important times of the year for the Greater Chicago Food Depository, which has as its goal ensuring that local residents do not have to experience the hardships of going hungry.
The Food Depository recently recruited Downtown Partners Chicago to create an ad campaign and a website that focus attention on one of the Depository’s newest programs to prevent hunger — Rise and Shine Illinois.
Launched earlier this fall, Rise and Shire aims to make free breakfasts widely available in schools for young children who may not be living in a household where they can get that important first meal of the day.
In announcing the new school breakfast program in September, Greater Chicago Food Depository CEO Kate Maehr said: “We believe school breakfast is a critical tool in addressing hunger. Making breakfast available gives children the nutrients and energy they need to thrive in an academic setting.”
Getting the message out about the availability of these free breakfasts and the government program that provides them has been the responsibility of Downtown Partners, which created the website that explains the program to parents, students and other interested supporters. At the website parents and others can fill out a form to start the breakfast outreach process at a particular school.
Downtown Partners executive Dan Consiglio emphasized that it’s important for parents to know about the Rise and Shine breakfast program so they can do what is necessary to ensure their kids have access to the free breakfasts at the schools they attend.
A series of out-of-home ads from Downtown Partners also draws attention to the interrelated themes of hunger and learning. One outdoor execution shows the text in a schoolbook in disarray around a bowl of cereal. The takeaway? When a child is hungry, it’s harder for the pupil to focus on learning.
The current goal of Rise and Shine Illinois and the ad campaign is to provide those breakfasts for 38,000 more students by the end of the 2015-16 school year.