In 2019, Rebecca Wood and her then-six-year-old daughter, Charlie, were struggling with school lunch debt. Charlie didn’t qualify for free or reduced-price lunch “because on paper, it looked like we had a good income,” explains Wood, who was working in health care policy at the time. But because Charlie was born prematurely at twenty-six weeks, she needed costly treatments and therapies, the bills for which piled on top of Wood’s exorbitant asthma medication co-pays and her sky-high Boston-area rent. The US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) narrow meal eligibility criteria didn’t account for any of this.

“It seemed like I’d get a paycheck and it was out the door before I could even think about how to spend it,” Wood told Jacobin. “Charlie would come home from school and say, ‘Mom, you need to give money to the cafeteria again.’” But each time Wood added a small, scraped-together sum to Charlie’s nutrition account, a $2.50 transaction fee swallowed up the cost of an entire meal.

Wood did some research and discovered that Charlie’s district in Revere, Massachusetts, could qualify for the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), which enables schools with high concentrations of student poverty to make meals universally free. When she asked the superintendent about it, she was met with resistance. But she persevered — talking with other moms, the teachers union, Massachusetts lawmakers, “basically anyone who would listen to me” — and eventually won universal meals for Revere students. For her and Charlie, it was “a game changer”: