Friday, November 21, 2008
Sending hunger packing
Send us your giving news Your Community, P.O. Box 2491 Roanoke, VA. 24010 or e-mail yourcommunity@roanoke.com.Backpacks filled with nutritious meals make sure children are fed even when school is not in session.
Eric Brady | The Roanoke Times
Kelly Cullather (left) and Whitney Price, volunteers with the Junior League Healthy Kids Committee, fill backpacks with food at the Boys & Girls Club in Roanoke. The backpacks are stocked with meals and snacks from the Southwestern Virginia Second Harvest Food Bank and distributed to children on Friday afternoons to ensure they are fed over the weekend.
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Backpacks aren't just for books anymore.
When filled with nutritious food, they can also help fight childhood hunger.
Feeding America, formerly America's Second Harvest, runs a program to feed children in communities across the country by providing them with backpacks full of food to eat over the weekend and during school holidays. Kids typically pick up the backpacks on Friday and return them Monday.
The BackPack Program came to the Roanoke area in 2005 through the Southwestern Virginia Second Harvest Food Bank, a partner organization of Feeding America. Since then, the program keeps growing both in numbers of sites and children served at each site.
"There's a huge increase in need and a lot more awareness as to people in the community who might need help," said Jackie Cundiff, the food bank's children's program coordinator.
Cundiff said that the program sites are only in areas where 50 percent or more of children receive free or reduced-cost lunches in public schools.
The program started at Northwood Middle School in Saltville at a time when unemployment was high in the rural community near Abingdon and many kids were going hungry. Volunteers at a local church started filling backpacks with food for them to take home, Cundiff said.
In September 2006, the program expanded to the Boys & Girls Club in Roanoke. Then, programs started at both the North Tazewell Elementary School in Tazewell and Highland View Elementary School in Bristol in September 2008.
Cundiff said two unofficial programs also started at Highland Park and Hurt Park elementary schools in Roanoke in September 2007.
Such programs keep steadily growing.
For instance, the program at the Boys & Girls Club started with 35 children in 2006 and then doubled within a year. Today it serves 117 children after receiving a $25,000 grant from the Junior League of Roanoke, Cundiff said.
The food bank provides nutritious food to each site, and then volunteers stuff the backpacks with items such as cereal, milk, fruit juice, peanut butter, chicken salad, spaghetti, beef stew and other assorted snacks. A typical backpack will include two breakfasts, two lunches, two dinners and two to three snacks that are all shelf-stable, Cundiff said.
While the program provides significant help, it is also expensive to run because of high food prices and the large number of employees and volunteers needed to operate it.
"We're really limited with the staff that we have and finding a program that has adequate staff," Cundiff said.
