Kiwanis Club of Omaha Westside

A program aimed at helping students who are at risk of going hungry meet their nutritional needs on weekends is already providing food to more than 100 Chadron students a week, and may grow even larger in the future. The Chadron Kiwanis Club started the area’s first backpack program in April, 2011, as a community service project to help young people,  Leslie Bargen, who chairs the project, said Friday. The program provides students a backpack filled with an assortment of food items on Friday afternoons, for their weekend use.  Students return the backpack when they come back to school on Mondays. Kiwanis club members collect the backpacks at midweek, and gather on Fridays to reload them with food. Through the backpack program, the Kiwanis club is providing food to 107 students in Chadron elementary and intermediate schools, and an additional 40 students from the local Head Start program, said Bargen. For some children, school breakfast and lunch meals are the main source of nutrition, and on weekends those children  may have little or no food, said Bargen. The backpack program aims to make at least some difference in that situation, so that children have something to eat when they don’t get a school lunch, she said. Bargen said she had heard of the backpack idea when her family lived in California, and thought of it  last year, when the club was looking for a youth-oriented service project. Newspaper articles about backpack programs in Scottsbluff and Alliance reinforced her idea about trying it in Chadron, she said. Unsure of how to get started, Bargen said she contacted Sandi Roes of Western Community Health Resources, and school superintendent Dr. Caroline Winchester, as well as some Chadron State College staff members with expertise in nutrition and public health. Bargen said she was unsure about how to get food to fill the backpacks, and what should be included, but then learned from Shari Blome of WCHR and a member of the Lifespan Wellness Team, that the Food Bank of the Heartland in Omaha already had a backpack program and could provide the food packages. “They were looking to expand to western Nebraska and I got on their list,” Bargen said. Food Bank for the Heartland began its program in 2006, and currently provides 3,900 food packs per week, to students in 80 schools across 26 school districts, according to the group’s website. In Nebraska, one in five children under age 18 is at risk for hunger, the web site says, and nationally there are more than 3,600 backpack programs that provided food packs to more than 190,000 children in 2009. Joining up with the established backpack effort was a big boost for the Kiwanis project, said Bargen. The food bank delivers a supply of  prepackaged food items once a month, and club members gather weekly to load the packages into the backpacks and deliver them to the schools. The packages contain two packs of breakfast cereal, a juice, a milk, two ‘fruit cups’ and two canned items-typically some kind of pasta, said Bargen. “It’s food for the weekend,” she said. Cooperation from WCHR has been quite important in the project, noted Bargen. The organization, which operates from the old Chadron Community Hospital building, makes space available to store the food packages, and is the staging site for filling the backpacks each week. Food storage is particularly important, said Bargen, and many school-based programs struggle because they don’t have a good place to keep food between deliveries. Bargen said the Chadron Walmart also helped with the project, by providing the backpacks at cost. The Chadron office of FALCO also helped by designating the project as its charity for the year, she said. At Christmas, the club used donated funds to purchase a $10 Walmart gift card, limited only to food purchases, for each backpack participant,  she said. Dr. Winchester  was very supportive in getting the project established, according to Bargen. At her suggestion, the program was made open to all students, not just those who qualify for free/reduced price meals.  Families do have to apply to have their child enrolled in the program, but don’t have to meet any income qualifications, said Bargen. Knowing that many families struggle constantly to meet their children’s food needs, the club tries to include extra food packs on three-day weekends and holidays, said Bargen. There has also been discussion about providing additional food for younger siblings of participating students, she noted. The club also plans to offer backpacks for students at Chadron Middle School, as soon as the logistics can be arranged, Bargen said. The substantial demand for the weekend food packages from families in Chadron came as somewhat of a surprise, said Bargen. “Apparently there is a lot of child hunger in the community,” she said. “Sometimes we don’t see the need.” Although the Kiwanis club doesn’t collect food for the backpacks, anyone interested in helping with donations for food purchases can contact Food Bank for the Heartland at 402-905-4808. The organization says on its website that a donation of  $168 provides enough food for a weekly backpack of food for one year.   

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