Poverty, food insecurity, and poor nutrition have serious detrimental impacts on the health, development, and well-being of infants and young children in the short and long terms.

Participation in the Women, Infants and Children program (WIC) leads to healthier babies, more nutritious diets for families, better health care for children, and higher academic achievement for students.

One in six children in the U.S. live in food insecure households. In California, nearly one in five children are food insecure.

"More than 1 of every 10 people in the Bay Area today are hungry. But they are not only the visibly famished, digging through the trash in Union Square for the remains of someone’s lunch. They are low-income families that have jobs and housing but have still fallen through the cracks during the Bay Area’s spectacular rebound from the recession, as it has become the country’s richest and most expensive region."

In 2015, CalFresh moved roughly 800,000 Californians out of poverty.