We hope to raise another $3000 to be able to distribute 200 bags of groceries (prepacked by Margot and others like her) to help tide families over the winter break. Make a donation through Kennett Library to the Winter Pantry help us reach our goal!
For those children who depend on schools for breakfast and lunch, holidays can bring hardship if not hunger. Kennett Library discovered how great a problem this was during the summer holidays this past year, when they hosted an event to help local vendors distribute extra produce to families: over 600 families came to collect!! With the winter holidays approaching, we learned that the Library was exploring how to repeat this success. The result? Kennett Library will host 2 Winter Pantry days - December 27 and January 4 - with the help of KAN pre-packing bags and and the potential of a food drive organized by Kennett Consolidated School District (KCSD).
Why is KAN involved? When I learned about this need as a board member of the Library, I saw an opportunity for Margot to learn some important new skills while giving back to the community. We had been trying to teach her how to pack crates, and just begun to test whether she could help to pack emergency food assistance (TEFAP) boxes of pantry items that Kennett Area Community Services (KACS) provides to families. The latter is interesting because the items packed are fairly standardized, allowing us to design a more structured lesson (packing a box efficiently with items that vary in size is a surprisingly complex skill!).
In consultation with KACS, we have pulled together a list of pantry items popular with families, and have begun raising money to pre-pack bags to give out to families. The $2000 we have pulled together to date allows us to fill almost 80 bags at about $26-27/bag, and we have already begun to gather items (see right). In addition to helping to pack bags, Margot will be stretching the budget to help even more families with rice and beans that she has re-packed herself, saving about 25 and 50 cents per pound respectively. She will also be assembling more of the healthy instant oatmeal packets she has begun to provide to KACS over the past 6 months. And for the holidays, Margot will be assembling a coconut rice pudding meal kit! In addition to the food provided by KAN, we hope that KCSD will be conducting a food drive before the holidays. If the drive is as successful this year as in past years, we hope that families will be able to walk away from the library with a KAN shopping bag AND maybe one or two more filled with items they choose from the food drive.
And the Winter Pantry project allows us to pursue another goal... creating a way for other programs serving youths with disabilities to demonstrate that they CAN have an impact, with relatively little effort. So we reached out to all of the area special education programs as well as adult service programs to offer to bring them bags to pack... and offer to teach them how!.
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