School lunch on Friday afternoon can occasionally be the last thing a kid eats until they go back to school on Monday.
Who will feed the kids this weekend?
That’s the tagline for Blessings in a Backpack; a nonprofit organization based in Louisville, Kentucky that currently feeds 87,000 kids in 45 states.
More than 12 million children in the United States reside in “food insecure” homes, according to ‘No Kid Hungry.’
Families sometimes need to choose between paying rent or feeding their kids.
Volunteers and organizers of Blessings in Backpack hear those data and quickly set off to change that.
” We started to fundraise in February of 2013. Actually, it was Valentine’s Day. We gave our first bags to 42 kids in three schools. That’s how we got started and it’s just grown from there,” says Melissa Archer, a spokesperson for Blessings in a Backpack.
Archer lives in Atlanta and formed a team of volunteers in her neighborhood church and schools.
She says the sack of food they create for children to take home carries an emotional weight.
Impacting the future
” From what we’ve heard from the kids, they say that when they get something like this, that it comes from people that don’t even know them, that it shows them that the community out there cares about them, even though they don’t know who we are,” says Archer.
Now, as volunteers across the nation load sacks of food, they also add handwritten notes.
Archer says it’s a personal message of optimism.
” You know, you might think this is nothing. It’s just words on a piece of paper,” says Archer. “But to these children, it means a huge amount because they’re getting inspired by someone who doesn’t know them. And typically, it’s someone that’s their peer.”
Schools are seeing numbers-based outcomes of their hard work.
Archer says a nearby school in Atlanta reported a 100% attendance rate for children who received backpacks after one year of engagement in the program.
The ultimate goal is an increased community involvement. Every child deserves a bag full of love.
There are likely opportunities with Blessings in a Backpack in your area.
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