A Nutritious Backpack for the Weekend

A backpack carrying pencils and a notebook prepares students for a lifetime ahead of education and success, but a backpack that contains food makes sure they will properly be fed and not suffer from hunger. The Feeding America Backpack Program has been a successful plan, “helping children get the nutritious and easy-to-prepare food they need to get enough to eat on the weekends.” 15 years of prosperous work has led them to where they are today — delivering over 450,000 backpacks to children every Friday afternoon.

Josie Ramnani, Coordinator of the Hudson Valley branch for the Children’s Programs at the Food Bank, mentioned the current propositions to bring back the Backpack Program to our very own school district here in Poughkeepsie. Seeing as the program aims to provide students from low income families with a backpack full of food for the weekends, it gives kids access to meals when they won’t have access to school lunches.

Although the program was running in the district a few years ago, it ran into a few bumps and unfortunately was cut off. “Kids were benefiting from it because Poughkeepsie is a very high need area and lack of food security is a huge issue,” Ramnani said. She is looking to change that this year with the help of the Poughkeepsie City School District.

This program is free of charge to students, as long as they sign a student contract to bring back the numbered backpacks every Monday so they could be redistributed the following Friday. Funding for a program like this usually comes from individual donors and providers looking to help the specified school district. But as of right now, Poughkeepsie has enough grants and funding from the Food Bank to start the program right away.

Maintaining the program requires a bit of coordination between the members of the community and the school. The Food Bank only delivers the backpacks to the closest stop, in Highland, where a community volunteer or school faculty member must go pick up the backpacks at a specific time to then make the appropriate disbursements. “For Poughkeepsie, we’ve been focusing on the Health and Wellness Committee to reach out through their mechanisms to get teachers, social workers, nurses, and everyone else on board,” Ramnani said. “We’re looking for community partners to facilitate the packing and picking up of backpacks.”

Some families struggle, constantly working to make ends meet. This unfortunately leads to parents not being involved in every aspect of their child’s life, leaving kids at home to fend for themselves on the weekend.

Essentially with only $5,000, the Backpack Program can provide 30 kids in the district with food for a whole weekend throughout the entire year. Inside a backpack are ready to eat cans of food and pre-prepped meals. The idea is to make sure a portion of the student population is receiving help from the Backpack Program, and that no student that needs the program gets turned away. “We’re still in the beginning stages, but it’s about getting a core group of people committed to [helping].”