Walmart Teams Up With Boca Helping Hands
By: Linda Santacruz
Every Friday, kids in Palm Beach County area are being sent home from school with an extra backpack to carry. However, this one is not filled with weekend homework–it’s filled with food.
According to the Boca Helping Hands website, over 58% of American school children receive their primary meal each day through the federal free and reduced lunch program. That raises the obvious question: what do these kids eat on weekends?
Boca Helping Hands’ Backpack program is now offering weekend meals to eight local elementary schools. The bags include six meals like as pre-cooked macaroni and cheese with a peel-off top, two juice boxes and two snacks.
May not seem like much to some, but it could mean a necessary meal for the 1400 kids going home with them.
“This is food for an entire weekend for an elementary school child,” said Boca Helping Hands Executive Director, James Gavrilo. “Some of us will come home and put this on a Ritz Cracker and eat it for a snack.”
Coral Sunset Elementary, Addison Mizner Elementary and Hammock Point Elementary School are just three of the eight schools signed up to receive the stuffed backpacks.
Each of these schools is adopted by a local faith community group. They have committed their financial resources as well as the manpower needed to pack the backpacks each week.
Every Thursday, Gavrilo’s team loads pallets with food to be delivered to the schools by Monday. The community groups are then responsible of putting the food in the backpacks and getting them ready for the kids to take home on Friday.
Grace Community Church and Junior League of Boca Raton are just two of the volunteering groups.
However, the BHH staff and volunteers are only a part of what runs this program. The other part is the supporters. The Wal-Mart Foundation is one of financial supporters who recently approved a $30,000 grant for the program.
“When I walked into this facility, it changed my life,” said Craig Herr, the district manager for the Wal-Mart stores in Lake Worth, Boca Raton and Pompano Beach area. “I’m actually going to have my family come during the holiday season to help volunteer.”
But the extent of the needs is confounding in a city where the per capita income is nearly twice the state’s. Jackie Reeves, a Boca Helping Hands volunteer, told the Sun Sentinel that her friends in New York have a hard time believing it.
“I tell them, ‘You have no idea,'” she said, recalling the lines she’s seen heading in to Boca Helping Hands for a free meal.
“God does not expect us to do great things but we can all do small things with great amounts of love,” Gavrilo lectured to a room full of supporters, school representatives and volunteers during a special reception. “You just step up and do it. That’s how you solve problems.”
