Rally Against Hunger
Houston is a city filled with beautiful, diverse, and vibrant people, home to many wonderful statistics that make Houstonians proud. But, did you know that Houston ranks 3rd in our country, behind Los Angeles and New York, for numbers of children living with food insecurity? Food insecurity as defined by the United Stated Department of Agriculture, refers to inconsistent access to healthy food options. According to Feeding America’s Map the Meal Gap report for 2019, 23.2% of the 284,790 children living in Harris county do not have a reliable food source or know where their next meal will come from. The U.S.D.A. by census, identifies an estimated 13 “food desert” tracks inside Loop 610, and 70 between 610 and Beltway 8. These urban “food deserts” are generally defined as neighborhoods with no or limited access to grocery stores, combined with limited financial and transportation resources. Families who are food insecure, living in food desert neighborhoods, are often forced to make trade-offs between important basic needs, such as housing, transportation or health care, and purchasing nutritionally sound foods. For school aged children, our national safety net of support comes from school breakfast and lunch programs, but what do kids do on the weekends while away from these programs? How do children return to school on Monday ready to listen, learn, attend and play when food access is uncertain and inconsistent on Saturday and Sunday? How can children find academic success without proper nutritional readiness to do so? Providing a basic need, such as food, helps to eliminate non-academic barriers to education and is a critical piece of helping these children become productive, successful students and community members.
Cue, Blessings in a Backpack!
In 2011, a group of women from Holy Spirit Episcopal Church, led by KariAnn Lessner, learned of urban food deserts in Houston. From that awareness came a call to ministry to feed kids who were hungry, especially when away from school meal programming. After much prayer and research, the national organization, Blessings in a Backpack, was discovered. Launched from the Holy Spirit Episcopal Community in August of 2012, Bayou City Blessings in a Backpack (BCB) became a local, Houston implementation of the national program with the vision to work collaboratively with partner schools to remove childhood hunger as a non-academic barrier to learning so that all children have the opportunity to experience academic success. BCB mobilizes our local community, individuals and resources to provide food on the weekends and during school breaks for Houston children who might otherwise go hungry. Our mission serves to raise awareness of childhood hunger by building community and establishing relationship with our educational partners to improve the lives of Houston children. BCB finds its purpose in John 21:15 “Feed my lambs.”
The BCB program began with 60 children attending Blackshear Elementary (in Houston’s Third Ward) and has grown to serve 1,465 children across 5 elementary schools during the 2018-2019 school year. In addition to Blackshear Elementary, children attending Grissom, Foerster and Montgomery Elementary schools (Southwest Houston) as well as children at Spring Shadows Elementary (North Spring Branch) receive a weekend food bag every Friday during the 38 weeks of school. Children receiving our backpacks qualify for federal Free and Reduced Price Meal programs and are identified, confidentially, by school staff. Food bags are delivered directly to each school and contain a variety of easy to prepare, healthy food options. Examples of items packed in our bags include: cans of tuna, cans of ravioli, pasta, beans & rice, macaroni & cheese, raisins, fruit cups, applesauce, cereal bowls, shelf-stable milk, granola bars, crackers, and a fresh fruit option. BCB is almost an entirely volunteer run organization, allowing it to spend a greater portion of its fundraising dollars on actual food products.
On August 25th, Christ Church Cathedral will assemble 100,000 meals for distribution to children in our program. Each bag will contain 6 servings which means that when these bags go home from school with children on a Friday, it will likely feed the entire family. These bags will be targeted for distribution over long weekends and holidays, where food insecurity may rise due to time away from the consistency of school meal programming. While the full benefits of including these meals are unknown to us, we work in faith that it “Feeds Lambs” not only in body, but also in mind and spirit. God assures us in Isaiah 58:10-11
if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,
then your light will rise in the darkness,
and your night will become like the noonday.
The Lord will guide you always;
he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land
and will strengthen your frame.
You will be like a well-watered garden,
like a spring whose waters never fail.
I don’t know about you, but “well-watered gardens with springs whose waters never fail”, doesn’t sound much like a desert to me, and kids traveling home from school on Friday with food in their backpack doesn’t look like hunger on the weekend.
We invite you to join Bayou City Blessings in feeding the children of Houston.
