The Food 4 Kids Backpack Program

A few of you may have noticed my blog inactivity these past months.  I have, in fact, become immersed in a local project that has taken a little piece of my heart, and which I would like to share with you in this post.  It is a local, but not so little charity called the Food 4 Kids Backpack Program of North Florida, which, as you may have guessed by the name, is all about getting food directly to needy school children in our area.

The Food 4 Kids Backpack Program of North Florida started several years ago with, of all things,  a school pizza party.  An industrious woman named Jennifer Moore decided, with the school’s permission, to give her child a birthday treat by bringing pizza for the whole class.  As the pizza slices were handed out, she noticed a few children that seemed a little too excited about the process.  As she watched, they devoured the first pieces.  And their second.  And then the teacher quickly and quietly supplied them with another.  And another.

Something was obviously off.

During the cleanup, Jennifer discreetly remarked, “Gee, they sure are hungry today.”

“It’s Monday,” the teacher said by way of explanation.

Jennifer was horrified by the rest of the teacher’s news.  These children were completely dependent upon the school breakfast and lunch program for food.  Thus, on weekends, when there was no school, they had very little or, in some cases, nothing to eat.  By the time they returned to school on Monday they were, quite literally, starving.  They would spend that entire day obsessed with eating or saving food for either for themselves or their siblings.  The situation was so extreme that a few teachers kept emergency snacks to sneak to the children to help with concentration during class work.

The problem, however, is far more wide spread than just a few children in one classroom, or even that one school.  In 2013, the US census bureau estimated that 20 percent of US children live at or below the poverty line.  That’s about one in five children whose families struggle to keep food on the table.  In Alachua and Levy county, the area now served by the Food 4 Kids Backpack Program of North Florida, about 52 percent (more than half) of families with school age children qualify for the school assisted meal program.  In fact, the situation is so dire in 19 of  Alachua county’s schools that officials were swamped with incoming applications for the program.  The US Department of Agriculture subsequently awarded a grant that pays for all breakfasts and lunches at these schools to alleviate the problem.

Even with this assistance, some families still struggle to feed their children on weekends and during school holidays.  Thus, Jennifer decided to start up her own independent branch of a relatively new, nationally expanding program called the Food 4 Kids Backpack Program.  At first, she ran the program out of her house and hand delivered the children’s food to their houses so they had something to eat when not at school.  As more people became aware of the problem, the program quickly grew.  It now serves 22 schools and the incoming donations are sorted and distributed to school pantries from a Gainesville warehouse.  The number of students fluctuates, but, at the time I am writing this article, that amounts to around 450 meals provided every week.  On Fridays, the children pick up their food filled backpacks before they leave school and return them the following Monday.  Volunteers then restock the backpacks from the school pantry and have them ready to go for the next Friday.

Rather than requiring families to research the program and apply, school staff have been provided with a list of behaviors associated with extreme hunger.  When they see these behaviors, they refer the family to the program.  As the backpacks are kept within the school, the children can retrieve the food themselves, rather than relying on someone to take them to a pantry or store.  Though this does restrict the supply to nonperishable foods, it also ensures that the children receive items from all the major food groups (the volunteers fill the backpacks from a specific list that was developed with the assistance of a nutritional consultant).

Though most of the volunteers never have contact with the children, the program’s impact is apparent.  At the end of the school year, as volunteers clean out the backpacks for reuse, several hand drawn thank you notes and cards are found within the recesses.  Some are the creations of children so young they can barely scribble out the words (in crayon).

Proper nutrition is especially important for children’s growing bodies, and chronic hunger at these stages has been associated with lifelong health issues and increased hospitalization rates.  Therefore, intervention at this stage can have a huge impact for the duration of the children’s lives.  The hope, also, is to end the cycle of poverty by giving these children the ability to focus on their school work instead of where their next meals might come from.  If they can place more effort on their educations, they will be more likely to find better jobs as adults. 

If you would like to learn more about the program and how you can help, please check out the website or the Facebook page.

For more information on childhood hunger in the US, visit feedingamerica.org or nokidhungry.org.