Just $1 provides 15 pounds
of food to those in need.
Group hopes to help cut costs for struggling program that feeds low-income students in Northeast Missouri
Feb 11, 2012
MARY POLETTI of Quincy Hearld Whig
HANNIBAL, Mo. — A can of soup or a box of cereal might not seem like much. But Principal Vicki Dudding believes it could make a world of difference in the students she sees each Monday morning at Eugene Field Elementary School.
“They come to school better prepared on Monday to learn because they have had the opportunity to have nutritious meals over the weekend,” Dudding said. “Not that they don’t before, but this is just a little added to it.”
Students at Eugene Field are among the more than 500 Marion County schoolchildren who take home backpacks full of free food each Friday.
It’s a program called the Buddy Pack program, administered locally by the Hannibal Alliance for Youth Success and overall by the Food Bank of Central and Northeast Missouri.
HAYS’s Buddy Pack program is thriving in Marion County, thanks to locally raised funds that stay in the community. But the food bank itself is struggling to keep the program going, and Families and Communities Together hopes to step in with a solution to help keep it viable.
The need is so great that FACT, which serves as HAYS’ fiscal agent, doesn’t have much of a choice, FACT CEO Stephanie Thomeczek said.
“Our job as a community has been to partner with the food bank to raise more resources to be able to stretch (the program’s) resources even further,” she said.
The program has ballooned in the last several years, said Mike DeSantis, the food bank’s regional coordinator for 12 Northeast Missouri counties, including Marion. At the start of this school year, the Buddy Packs program served nearly 9,000 children at 138 schools in 32 counties. When it started seven years ago, it served 300 kids in three counties.
In Marion County, the program feeds 567 elementary school students. FACT also covers the cost of feeding 100 more middle school students through a similar, local program.
“This is the most successful program the food bank has ever done,” DeSantis said.
However, its costs have ballooned, too. Where it once cost $100 to feed one student for a year, rising food and fuel costs have pushed that to $180. Without more financial help, the program could face deep cuts.
Thomeczek believes helping to cut down on fuel costs could be part of the answer.
In Marion County, for example, a truck from the Columbia-based food bank makes weekly visits to a local drop site, Hannibal’s Tabernacle of Praise church, and passes on thousands of pounds of food. Volunteers there assemble packs of food — juice, soup, cereal, peanut butter and other simple staples — that local school staffers pick up and distribute to kids each Friday in new or lightly used backpacks.
Thomeczek said FACT is hoping to purchase warehouse space in the community so that food can be delivered less frequently and stockpiled for longer, cutting down on the food bank’s costs and helping the local program keep on top of things.
If the truck can drop off several weeks’ food at a time, it can cut down on trips and save significantly on fuel costs. But space is the issue, Thomeczek said.
So is fundraising. While the food bank overall is working to raise funds primarily through the Adopt-a-Buddy program, in which members of the community can donate to cover a student’s or several students’ costs for a year, they get no money from local fundraising.
“All the money raised in a county stays in the county,” DeSantis said. “You’ve got to love your neighbor first.”
FACT is leveraging Marion County’s local fundraising, which has been very successful, to find a local warehouse where nonperishable food can be stored for several weeks. However, the bulk of its fundraising has been directed toward its middle school program.
In another possible scenario, FACT’s offices on Jaycee Drive in Hannibal could themselves become the drop site for food, providing more space.
Thomeczek agrees that finding a solution is key to making sure low-income children stay fed, healthy and productive. So does DeSantis, who says the program is unique in that it solves a problem without necessarily spotlighting why it occurs.
“The one thing I love about this program is that the spotlight is on the answer,” he said.
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