Initially a task force made up of members of First United Methodist Church Big Spring met in the fall of 2013 and identified the issue of elementary students not receiving enough food over the weekends. From the very beginning of the program the original task force wanted the Food 2 Kids Big Spring program to be a community effort and include involvement from many churches, organizations and individuals. Though started by a group from First United Methodist Church Food 2 Kids Big Spring has been and continues to be an independently run 501c3 nonprofit since November of 2016.
The intent of the Task Force was to identify and provide food for children who may not eat a regular meal between the schools provided lunch on their campus on Fridays and the school provided breakfast at their campus on Monday.
Once we had established the mission we formed a partnership with the Food 2 Kids program through the West Texas Food Bank in Odessa, TX. They provided us with all the information and paper work to set up our own program. This included the criteria students must meet to be eligible for the program, the forms to send home with students, and generally how to set it up in the schools. We began with Goliad Elementary School which is one campus of Big Spring ISD and the first weekend sacks of food were sent home the first Friday of November 2013.
Based on information from the school we estimated that around 200 students would possibly need a weekly weekend food sack. Based on that we placed a 3 month order with the West Texas Food Bank. Food 2 Kids has 2 set menus that meet the nutritional standards, a child can open all the containers and the food does not need refrigeration and can be eaten at room temperature. We currently continue to order all of our food items from the West Texas Food Bank and we set up volunteers to unpack the food items that we order in bulk to prepare for the sacking times when we prepare the food sacks to be sent home with the students we serve.
Fast forward to the school year of 2019 - 2020 we served approximately 425 students at 5 different Big Spring ISD campuses from Pre-K through 6th grade. We currently operate out of the Lakeview School Gym. It takes the space of a gymnasium in order to carry out our complete operation of receiving pallets of food, unpacking the food, sacking the food sacks and storing the bins that contain the sacked food items. All the work for Food 2 Kids Big Spring is done by volunteers. We currently have a 14 member Board of Directors made up of individuals from four different churches and Big Spring ISD personnel. We rely on many volunteers throughout a regular school year to help us complete the task of having 425 weekend food sacks ready to send home with students every Friday.
Our regular volunteer schedule during the school year is to meet the first Monday and Tuesday of each month at 5:30 PM at the Lakeview School Gym (1107 NW 7th St.) and sack the child-friendly food items such as juice boxes, cereal, beef ravioli, vienna sausage, pudding, cheese cups, pretzels and a rice krispy treat into paper sacks that will be delivered to the 5 school campuses that we serve. We are carefully making plans for the 2020 - 2021 school year and we know that we will have to change our normal operations including how our volunteers meet to sack food, etc.
In summary, Food 2 Kids Big Spring began in November 2013 serving one school campus and currently we serve five school campuses - serving up to 425 students per week during the school year. We became our own independent 501c3 nonprofit in November 2016 and we completely rely on community donations and grants to help us buy the food for the children in need in our community. One hundred percent of donations to Food 2 Kids Big Spring stay in Big Spring to serve our community. We are grateful for all the community support we have received to continue this most import mission of compassion and service.
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