Cherokee FCCLA Chief Pantry & Backpack Program

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In Alfalfa County, Oklahoma, 13.3% of residents are food insecure and of those 13.3%, 60% do not receive government assistance through SNAP. The annual budget shortfall for Alfalfa County is $392,000. To help combat this issue, our grade school has a backpack program in partnership with the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma, but our sixth through twelfth grade students were not being served by any program. We began our program in our junior high and high school building to help advocate for our students who are food insecure.

 

Goals And Objectives

The primary goal of our program is to provide healthy, nutritious food items to our food insecure students in a discreet manner. Another goal of our program is to fill the food gap left for our food insecure students over weekends and school breaks. Many of our program participants rely on breakfast and lunch each day at school to sustain them all day. Our backpack program fills the gap on the weekends and school breaks. This year, we added a “shopping day” on Tuesdays where the students actually visit the pantry building and are able to shop for their needs to hopefully fill the gap left on weeknights. Our hope is that by providing food to “fill the gap,” our students will be better able to focus and experience success at school – both socially and academically. Because many of our students who are food insecure also lack access to basic hygiene items, another goal of our project is to provide unrestricted access to these items for our students. The hygiene items are also located in our pantry building; however, these are available to anyone who lacks these items, not just those who are food insecure.

 

Major Activities, Resources Used, and Partnerships and Collaborations

Our FCCLA Chief Pantry program was founded in the fall of 2016. It was at this time that our FCCLA officers noticed the glaring need in our school. When students advanced into 6th grade, they move buildings in our school system. In our building, there was no program for our food insecure students. So, just because they left the fifth grade, their access to food to fill the gap when not in school ceased. After noticing this need, the first action that we took was contacting the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma to become a partner with their “School Pantry” program for middle and high schools. This is where we encountered our first obstacle; they were not adding any schools to their program. However, the committee refused to be discouraged and made the decision to take on this enormous task on our own. We used the guidelines developed by the Regional Food Bank and based our program on those guidelines. Each student referred to the program receives a backpack of food item each Friday. When our project first began, we utilized extra space in a closet in our library. However, before the 2018-2019 school year, in collaboration with another teacher in our school, we applied for and received a Lowe’s Toolbox for Education Grant and the Enid, Oklahoma Lowes Store also chose our project for their Lowes Hero Project. Our Superintendent also matched the Lowe’s Toolbox Grant funds. Within this grant, money was allocated for a new building to house our food pantry. We now have a stand-alone, climate-controlled, 200 square foot building located in the new outdoor classroom area of our school campus. This allowed us to expand our storage area for food and hygiene items. In September, the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma contacted our chapter and informed us that they had read about our project in the newspaper and that they were now accepting new schools for their program. After completing the application process, we were notified in November 2018 that we had been chosen for a partnership with them. As a result, we now receive a shipment of food each month for our pantry. The shipment contains between 800-1200 pounds of food for distribution in our school. Because of this new partnership, the students in our program now visit the pantry on their own each Tuesday and “shop” for their hygiene and food needs. This is in addition to the backpacks on Fridays. We currently have 24 students in our program. Initially, our program was funded entirely from monetary donations and donations of food and other items from our community. In the beginning, our public relations efforts included chapter social media sites and local and regional newspaper resources. We have partnered with the following community organizations and groups: Epsilon Sigma Alpha, Cherokee Rotary Club, Farmerettes HCE, Alfalfa Electric Cooperative, CoBank, Tulsa Community Foundation, Cherokee Thrift Store, Lowes, Lowes of Enid, and numerous other individuals in our community. Through the life of this project, we have received $20,000 of monetary donations and approximately $7,500 of in-kind donations.