Brandon Renfroe needed to raise $10,000 to help kids in Sumter County get meals on the weekends while they’re out of school.

He read an article last week saying that Mark Cuban, the billionaire businessman who starred on the reality TV series Shark Tank, reads all his emails. So Renfroe found three possible contacts for Cuban on Google and sent an email to each one.

“I didn’t really think we’d hear back from him but I thought it was worth a shot,” said Renfroe, a high school science teacher and adjunct education professor for the University of West Alabama.

In his email, Renfroe described how hard it is to fundraise for the Secret Meals program in Sumter County, one of the poorest counties in the state. He told the billionaire how just $10,000 could give kids meals throughout the school year.

“Any help you could render — any help at all — would be tremendously appreciated,” Renfroe wrote in the last line of the email.

Four days later, Renfroe received a call from Cuban’s chief financial officer, telling him that the Mark Cuban Foundation would send a check to the West Alabama Food Bank for $10,000, which is enough to fund secret meals for 72 students.

While getting his doctorate at UWA, Renfroe did his research on childhood food insecurity in the Black Belt. He administered the Household Food Security Survey created by the USDA to 742 students in 16 Black Belt high schools in 2021. Nearly a quarter of the students self-reported as experiencing food insecurity.

The research led Renfroe to volunteer with the West Alabama Food Bank and Sumter County Schools to help administer their Secret Meals program, which gives students who are food insecure meals on the weekends so they don’t go hungry while away from school.

In his email, Renfroe told Cuban about his research, which found that students in the Black Belt suffer from hunger at a rate 11 times higher than the national average.

The West Alabama Food Bank calculated that it costs $140 to feed one child for every weekend during the school year.

When Sumter County Schools first began the program in the 2022 school year, they raised $3,000 to feed 21 kids. Every year since then, the program has grown — going from 50 kids in 2023 to 72 last year, which the donation will help match.

The program is coordinated by Heather Shambry, the Child Nutrition Program director at Sumter County Schools. In 2022, Shambry told AL.com that “we wish we could give this to every kid,” but it would cost about $165,000 to provide secret meals to all students in the district.

The Alabama Coalition for Healthy Mothers and Children also pledged $5,000 a year over the next three years. Along with Cuban’s donation, Renfroe estimates that it’ll help the secret meals program sustain for the next two to three years.

“It’s just incredible and this will help so many kids,” said Renfroe.