Contributor: Usniaty Umayah

Over the past several months, we've posted many articles about our Kedai Balitaku (My Child's Café) program to help bring healthy food to Indonesia children. You may have read about it — and now's your chance to help us do more with the program!

Five-year-old Wulan, eating a natural orange fruit bar, is of of thousands of children that our Kedai Balitaku (My Child's Café) program is helping. Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps

From now through Wednesday, August 11, you can vote for Kedai Balitaku in the Changemakers Business for Social Change competition. Your vote will get us closer to winning a $5,000 grant that will go toward improving our work.

We're proud to be one of only 12 finalists in the competition, chosen from 448 entries from 78 countries!

As one of the managers for this healthy food initiative, I submitted our program to the competition in order to share our experience with organizations, people and countries that face the same problems in preventing malnutrition and fighting poverty. I think this is a good chance for others to learn from us, as well as for us to get feedback and find resources that will help us do even more for the children of Indonesia.

My vision is to provide more access to healthy food for children under five in some of Indonesia's biggest cities, as well as help create economic opportunities for entrepreneurs in poor urban neighborhoods. This project can truly have a positive impact on not just families, but entire communities.

If I won this competition, the money will be used for establishing new food carts as small businesses to sell healthy food, as well as managing and scaling up the overall program so that it moves closer to becoming a self-sustaining enterprise.

All we need is your vote! Please head over to the Changemakers website and give us your support. Thank you for your time, and we'll keep reporting on our progress in helping bring both healthy food and economic opportunity to Indonesia's cities!

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We would like to thank those who have given online to Mercy Corps by posting this three-minute video of a program made possible by your donations: Healthy Street Foods in Jakarta. Its name in Bahasa Indonesia is Kedai Balitaku, which translates to "My Child's Café."

This program was launched in response to the global food price spikes in 2008, and is implemented here in the capital city of Indonesia, a country with alarming rates of child malnutrition. Taking advantage of the popularity of street foods in urban Jakarta, the program is making healthy food accessible to children under five, while providing poor families new avenues to earn an income. Thanks to everyone who made this possible, including all my colleagues working for Mercy Corps Indonesia!

(By the way, the catchy song you'll hear in the video is the song that plays as the cart rolls along through neighborhoods in North Jakarta.)

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