Food Bank hopes to help students
EL CENTRO — Take any three students in the Imperial Valley, and one out of the trio is, statistically speaking, suffering from a lack of food at home.
This statistic comes from the Imperial Valley Food Bank, and is the basis for its slogan, “One in three students in Imperial Valley are hungry,” for its annual Weekend Backpack Program.
The annual program runs solely on donations and grants and feeds more than 600 local students in need.
As the namesake suggests, students in the program are provided a backpack, which gets filled each Friday during the school year with enough food to last them until they return to school Monday.
“These are kids that do not have food access regularly,” IVFB development assistant Stefanie Campos said. “They’re dependent on school meals—breakfast and lunch. These are children that, when they go home on Friday, they don’t have a lot of food at home in their cupboards.”
Counselors, teachers and principals determine which students are in need of the program, and IVFB provides the food on a weekly basis, which the student can discretely pick up on campus.
The program has grown far from its humble roots, as it started in 2007 by a teacher in Winterhaven who wrote a grant to provide about 50 students with backpacks filled with food.
IVFB since adopted the program it now provides 700 backpacks to 40 schools across the county.
The type of food provided each week in the program has to be something a child can make by his or herself. It has a degree of healthfulness to it, yet is still able to be prepared with, at most, a microwave.
Coincidentally, a majority of community members who volunteer at the IVFB on Wednesday mornings to pack each weekend meal are local retired teachers.
This year, the Food Bank has decided to step up its efforts, and, for the first time ever, is aiming to fill each of the backpacks with a basic set of school supplies.
However, as the Weekend Backpack Program is not a subsidized program, this goal can’t be achieved without the community’s help, Campos explained.
“Our hope is to fill the 700 backpacks so that the kids are able to start the school year with not just food, but also school supplies,” the development assistant said. “While we are absolutely maintaining the core focus of providing food, we thought it would be a great idea to add in school supplies just because we know that they will go to students who really need it and aren’t able to purchase those.”
Pencils, erasers, a box of 24 crayons and spiral notebooks are the four supplies being requested by IVFB.
The Food Bank hopes to receive any donations by the end of August so they can be included in the backpacks, which are distributed shortly after the school year starts.
Campos explained that the IVFB recognized that the demand for purchasing school supplies at the start of the school year often leaves low-income families with no remaining budget to purchase food.
“When you have a limited income and limited discretionary funds, then you have even less left over for food,” Campos said. “So we’re trying to fill the gaps, so if they’re not spending that money on school supplies, then they’ll also be able to purchase food as well.”
While the Weekend Backpack Program serves right by its slogan, the addition of school supplies further backs the IVFB’s overall mission: To bring health and hope to the Imperial Valley.
“Of course food is centered, and health is centered, in our core mission,” Campos said. “But the staff and employees here recognized that the people who are served and the children who are served from the backpack program could also use school supplies. They directly interact with families everyday, so we see that they have a lot of hardships outside of just food.”