"Food 4 Friends" Backpack program

There are things that we don't always realize that go on around us in our communities each and every day. Here in Mesa County we have 11 title one schools. A title one school means that at least 50% of the students are at or below poverty. They are on reduced and free lunches, also they get a free breakfast. This problem is apparent when the kids at these schools are saving half of their lunch to take home to their siblings. I know that we have been very fortunate to have always had food, but that is not the case for all.

Recently my friend Leah got to meet a man named Mike who provides backpacks for two of the schools in Mesa County. The children receive a backpack filled with food that they can eat over the weekend. The kinds of foods that are provided are Mac and Cheese, a loaf of bread, jar of peanut butter, 2 juice boxes, and some snacks. The food is kept simple enough that the child could make it for themselves if they had to.

Mike took on two schools and that is a great start, but the need is still even greater then that. The two schools he took are not title one. They still have the need, but it isn't as great as other schools.

Leah really thought that this program would be great for the Canyon View Church to help out the schools. They decided to take on two school, one title one and the other our local school Rimrock. Leah had anticipated that there might be around 100 students in need of the backpacks. So the letters went out to all of the students at both schools. Right away the numbers were higher then expected. As of now the numbers are over 220 children.

Well since the need for the children was so high, Leah and the other Children's Ministry Staff decided that they needed to present it to the congregation. By the second service all of the backpacks had been adopted out, and some. Right now there are 366 people who are willing to give a bag of food each week for the remainder of the school year. How amazing is that. With such a great response they are going to pick up one more school maybe even two.


This past week I had the opportunity to help put together the first set of backpacks. This is the chaos that we started with. You have to remember that this is a lot of food and we need to feed a lot of kids.



Here is Leah filling a backpack... Like I said each child got their own backpack that they bring back each week. It gets filled and then they get it again.

After school on Wednesday Mikayla and Gav came and helped organize and stuff the backpacks. I think it is great to get the kids serving in our community at such a young age. (I don't have a photo of Gav, I got busy and he was outside when I remembered to take some pictures.)

Here is me looking like an idiot. It was a long day... After we got most of the backpacks filled we started to separate all of the food into these large bins with wheels on one side.

Here is a better shot of the food in the bins. Now keep in mind this is what the bins looked like after we filled all of the backpacks.

Now to make this even more of a community outreach, these bins are going to go to the local high schools and some students there are going to be the ones filling the backpacks. Then the backpacks will be delivered to the school where the belong. How cool is that.

So as listed above there are 366 people out there wanting to support a child in their community. I was able to call all of the Rimrock people and let them know the first name of the child they are supporting. They can send notes to their child, a special treat, and be praying for their child.

On Thursday I had the privilege of delivering the 52 Rimrock backpacks. Will, Leah's husband, Gavin and I dropped them all off. We organized the backpacks to make it easier on the staff that was delivering them, and just got to tell everyone about the program. You should have seen how happy the ladies in the office were. They were so excited that the need of their kids were being met. I will keep you informed on how everything goes with the program, but so far so good.