Backpack Project

Bar Harbor Rotarians are volunteering to support a program that seeks to help alleviate hunger in some young children in the community.

Maine children and families face recurring food insecurity.  Even on Mount Desert Island, sizeable percentages of students qualify for free and reduced school lunch.  When the weekend comes, too many kids worry about their next meal – and too many return to school on Monday, worn out for not having had much to eat over the weekend.

In response to local need, in the spring of 2015 the representatives from local churches and the Bar Harbor Food Pantry started a new "backpack" program for local students -- an exciting collaborative effort among K-8 schools (administration, guidance counselors, school nurses, and teachers), businesses, congregations, volunteers, and the Bar Harbor Food Pantry.   The MDI Backpack Program helps alleviate students’ hunger by sending them home on Fridays with palatable, shelf-stable, nutritious, easily-prepared food. With parental permission, faculty and staff at local schools offer the program to needy students, distributing food discreetly.  By the end of the nine-week pilot program in the spring of 2015, the program had provided 172 packages of food in three area schools.

The MDI Backpack Program runs strictly on in-kind food donations, charitable donations, and volunteers.  For the 2015-2016 school year, the program plans to serve 30-35 students each week, with an anticipated budget of $6000; they have worked hard to identify foods that are kid-friendly, nutritious, and cost-effective.

Rotarians volunteer each Friday to spend less than an hour at the church to load used plastic shopping bags with a carefully selected "menu" of food to supplement the diets of children over the weekend when they do not have access to school lunches.  These menus are developed for their nutritious value and with recognition for the ages of the children. For example, kids in K-4 may get mac & cheese which they can microwave and eat right out of the container (yes the group did determine that even in homes with fewer resources than average, most have microwaves) while older kids get mac & cheese in a box which requires boiling the macaroni and adding milk and the cheese packet. The packages are then delivered to school officials who place them in backpacks of students selected for the program, which avoids any peer censure.

For the first weekend of Rotary involvement, Service Projects chair Shaun Farrar, in seeking 4 volunteers (the "assembly" room in the church is small) got nearly 20.