SNACK IN A BACKPACK
To meet the needs of children whose main nutrition are the meals served at school. Many children in the counties served by The Craddock Center rely on free breakfast and lunch during the school week. Because of lack of food on the weekends and during school vacations, the Backpack Program concept was developed at the Arkansas Rice Depot fifteen years ago and has become a national program.
The Craddock Center is participating in one county currently and plans to share this model with the other eight counties we serve. Nearly 60 percent of Fannin County students receive free or reduced meals at school.
“That’s two out of every three kids”, the school nutrition director reported. Each child in the program takes a backpack loaded with nutritious kid-friendly, non-perishable food home on Fridays and returns the empty backpack on Monday and volunteers repeat the process each week. Last week
The Craddock Center volunteers filled 64 backpacks at two schools with 832 packages of weekend food to children in need. If you’d like to help alleviate hungry tummies on the weekends, sponsorship opportunities are available:
- 1 child for 1 week: $6.00
- 1 child for 1 month: $26.00
- 1 child for 1 semester: $120.00
- 1 child for 1 school year: $240.00
We are looking for partners/sponsors for this program to help keep kids from going to bed hungry.