The Enid News and Eagle, Enid, OK

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November 25, 2009

Backpacks filled with food keep school kids from going hungry

Staff reports



Each Friday, staffs at several Enid and area schools quietly fill backpacks with peanut butter, crackers, juices and healthy snack items. Children quietly retrieve those backpacks before heading home for the weekend.

Those backpacks are the difference between having enough to eat over the weekend or going hungry.

The Enid News & Eagle again is sponsoring the Community Christmas Card, where readers can donate to Oklahoma Regional Food Bank’s local Food 4 Kids backpack program.

Hundreds of children in the Enid area have been identified as chronically hungry, and the Food 4 Kids program helps provide snacks and healthy food to sustain local students each weekend. It takes about $400 to provide enough food for one child for an entire school year. Some 400 local students from Enid and the surrounding area are served by the program.

“This is a great way for individuals, church groups, organizations or even civic clubs to give to a very worthwhile program,” said Cindy Allen, managing editor of the Enid News & Eagle. “Many people have been very generous and donated $20, $50 and $200 to the program. The beauty of this is you can donate as little as $1 and help a local child.”

For the past four years, the Community Christmas Card has donated more than $18,000 to the local program. Donors give a minimum of $1 per name to be published on a Community Christmas Card that will appear in one of the holiday sections of the Enid News & Eagle around Dec. 24 or 25.

The food and backpacks are provided to individual schools, and those schools are responsible for getting the backpacks distributed every weekend. The program is administered in a non-conspicuous way in order to protect the privacy of the children receiving the backpacks.

“News & Eagle readers have been very generous in their past support of this program,” Allen said. “All the money we collect goes straight to the local Food 4 Kids backpacks. Every dollar is spent right here in the community to help a local child.”

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