To get the 10 Cents a Meal program back in the state budget for 2027, the Groundwork Center for Resilient Communities had to change the way it played the game.

So says Amanda Brezzell, a policy and engagement specialist for Groundwork, and a key lobbyist behind 10 Cents a Meal. That program – which reimburses school districts, daycare centers, and other participating organizations 50 percent of the money they spend buying Michigan-grown produce for their cafeteria programs – was born in 2013 when Groundwork conducted a pilot initiative in northern Michigan. The program went on to become a multi-million-dollar earmark in the state budget, touching hundreds of school districts across the state.

Then, last year, legislators cut 10 Cents a Meal out of the budget.

Looking back, Brezzell thinks the program became a casualty of a contentious partisan budgeting process. Michigan didn’t have a signed budget for the 2026 fiscal year until October 7 – nearly a week after the constitutional deadline of October 1 – and legislators had to pass an eight-day continuation budget to avoid a shutdown. The last-minute budget followed a bitter standoff between the different chambers of the Michigan legislature, with the Republican-controlled House of Representatives pushing for some $5 billion in budget cuts compared to both the previous year and the 2026 proposals from Whitmer and the Democrat-controlled Senate.

“We were up against a legislature that was fighting, and our program became a political football,” Brezzell tells The Ticker. “The program was included in the Senate and the governor's budget drafts, but it was not included in the House school aid budget, and that is where things broke down. We had a lot of folks [in the House] who just didn't understand the program. In particular, they didn't understand that the program was not the same as universal school meals, the free breakfast and lunch program. And because those legislators didn't understand what the impact of the program was, it was an easy cut for them.”

Ever since 10 Cents a Meal fell out of the budget, Brezzell has been leading a coalition effort to get the program restored. That coalition includes Groundwork and its three partners in administering 10 Cents a Meal: the Michigan Department of Education, the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, and Michigan State University. Together, Brezzell says, those organizations have successfully championed the program to the point where 10 Cents a Meal funding appears in drafts of both the Senate agriculture budget and the House school aid budget.  

“It is a huge win for us to be written in to both of those spaces,” Brezzell says. “I think that we have a really high chance of being funded this year.”

Getting there, though, required Groundwork and its partners to pivot their advocacy strategy from prior budgeting cycles.

“When we had a Democratic majority [in the state legislature], we were talking a lot about students and what this program does for their brains and their bodies and their overall growth. That has been a reliably strong message,” Brezzell explains. “Then, last year, it felt like that message was falling on deaf ears. We really had to switch our strategy to focus more on our farmers and the economic impact of this program.”

The change meant less emphasis on one set of impact numbers – like the approximately 600,000 children 10 Cents a Meal reached in the 2024-25 school year – and more focus on dollars and cents. Funded at $4.5 million in the 2025 budget, 10 Cents a Meal allocated about $500,000 for the “administrative costs of the program,” Brezzell says, with the other $4 million going to schools to support their purchasing of Michigan-grown produce.

“That would mean $8 million goes to our farmers, because the program doubles the state's investment into those purchases,” Brezzell says. “If the budget is tight, why would you eliminate a program that generates double the revenue of what the state is putting into it? Making that argument really opened up a lot of people's eyes.”

She continues: “We also had a lot of legislators in rural areas who voted this program out last year and had no idea that the farmers in their district were benefitting from it. So, when I went to some of these budget committee hearings, I literally brought with me farmers from their districts who could say, ‘I can't farm this year because I don't have a market for my produce,’ because they’d lost those school accounts.”

Brezzell credits the support of farmers for getting 10 Cents a Meal into early budget drafts. Now the priority is making sure it stays there – and maybe pushing a change or two in bill language, too.

As written, the funding would allow 10 Cents a Meal to work with school districts and “non-public schools,” which Brezzell says is a more limited scope than previously existed for the program.

“The way it used to be written was basically ‘this program supports school districts and non-school sponsors,’” Brezzell explains. “They replaced ‘non-school sponsors’ with ‘non-public schools,’ but non-public schools have always been eligible for this program. In the past, we’ve had a significant number of private schools and parochial schools participate. But in 2021, we also welcomed in non-school sponsors, which includes anything that’s not a school but is a place where we are feeding children. So, that includes congregate meal sites, daycares, before and after-school programs, YMCAs, churches, latchkey services; all of that. Changing the wording eliminates thousands of children who are participating in this program under the title of non-school sponsors. We’re trying to get the legislature to add that language back in.”