Feeding program for local families

I have been working with Womenade, the Food Bank and Nipomo Elementary School to start a food distribution site for the Food Bank's Healthy Food for Local Families program. It started because one of the school counselors, who belongs to Womenade, asked whether Womenade was interest in starting a back pack program for kids who are short of food. Some said they were interested. There is a program at the Laguna Middle School in SLO run by some SLO Womenade members. I remembered that in Hartford, Foodshare had a back pack program but I also remembered reading that the local Food Bank was going away from back packs. I contacted them and indeed I remembered correctly. They felt that the few backpacks only provided food for that child and the need was much greater. They started a program called Healthy Food for Local Families. The back pack program in SLO depends on members to buy food and bring it to the school and the school counselor divides it among 4 or 5 backpacks for needy students. The Food Bank program supplies food from the USDA along with fresh produce from the Food Bank. The food is delivered to a school site once or twice a month and packed up into identical packages and people come to the school to pick it up. The distribution is done on an honor system - no identification needed and people only need to assert they are below a posted minimum income level for the size of their family. Each family receives a bag of shelf stable food and a bag of produce. The Food Bank has wanted to start a program in south county but no school signed up. On further inquiry it appears that the who process sounded like way too much work for already overstretched staff to handle. Enter Womenade. I floated idea at the last pot luck and found there was great interest in the idea. For the last 3 weeks I've had many meetings with the Food Bank, school Counselor we will be partnering with, school principal, school resource officer and many others. We have applied for use permit on the school grounds - the district waived the fee! We observed the process at another school yesterday to see how they handle their distribution. Notices have gone out to other schools, school counselors, social workers and other points of contact with people in food need. Over 90% of the children at this school are on reduced or free lunch so all their families qualify. We're starting our program with a once a month distribution and once things get going we may expand it depending on the demand. We are trying to gather reusable bags as our county is doing away with plastic bags as of October 1 and will start charging for paper bags. So far people have donated over 300 bags to the cause! As you can imagine, there's lots of paper work - we're dealing with the government! I have over 30 people signed up to help with this first give away on September 25.