Blessings In A Backpack Grand Ledge is celebrating our one year anniversary! Last May, members of local churches, service clubs, business, and community members came together to discuss the possibility of bringing a Blessings In A Backpack program to our community.
At that time over 1500 children in the Grand Ledge School District qualified for the free and reduced lunch program. While those kids are being fed during the school week, we wanted to ensure that these children were being adequately fed on the weekends during the school year.
While the free and reduced lunch programs feed at risk children during the school week, what happens on the weekend? Hunger doesn’t stop on the weekends.
We decided to target Beagle Elementary as our pilot program in the fall of 2012 because of the high percentage of students on the subsidized lunch programs there.
And thanks to the generous support from the community, we were quickly able to expand into all the other elementary schools by the beginning of 2013.
We are currently providing weekend food survival bags to 250-300 children in the Grand Ledge School District.
Every Friday this past school year, the at-risk students were sent home with a bag of kid friendly, non-perishable food such as mac and cheese, tuna, applesauce, oatmeal, canned vegetables, ramen noodles, granola bars and raisins.
All of our staff are volunteers and that’s how we can operate this unique program where 100% of your donations go toward buying the groceries to pack the bags to feed the kids with.
Just about everyone in the community has played a part in Blessings in A Backpack Grand Ledge, and if it weren’t for the many community members who donated time and money to help the at-risk children, we couldn’t have pulled off.
A toast to you Grand Ledge!
Grand Ledge 