Many children in our state face
food insecurity sometimes.
The majority of meals they get
are when they are in school.
That means on weekends or school breaks,
most of these kids go hungry.
Backpack Brigade is a local nonprofit
just down the street from us in Soto,
and they help fill that
gap of food insecurity.
Volunteers put together nutritiously balanced
meals for roughly 3500 children a week.
Michelle Hilton,
founder of the Backpack Brigade,
is here with us now to tell us
how she does it. And honestly,
I just Can I just hug you right?
Yes, for what you do and feeding these kids,
especially during the pandemic
when children weren't in school.
That was a real problem,
but you still worked in to make sure.
So let's talk about what we
have in front of us right now.
Yes. So we have our six menus that we
created to help represent the dietary,
religious and cultural needs of
all the students we're serving.
We have our standard bag.
We have a kosher halal,
We have a vegan, glutenfree, Hispanic,
Latinx and our Asian American on the end.
So you are really taking into account.
Not just saying, here's a bag of food.
This is what you get about whatt
means to be a person getting ths
food and how important that is.
Yes, exactly. It started about a year
and a half ago when we started talking
to some of our family support workers,
which is our contacts at the schools,
and saying, you know, some of the kids
can't eat that because they're gluten,
blah, blah, blah. Right.
So we did a survey and said,
well, what program?
I mean, what menus would you li?
What? What is out there?
And this is what we came up wit.
And we thought if a school was
getting like 100 bags, yeah,
well, their new, new.
Choice would have 6 menus,
so they still get 100 bags,
but maybe 10 of this and 20 of .
That is not how it worked.
That school who had 100 ordered.
So we added within a month 450 students.
Now one side is how awesome is ,
that we reach these kids that
weren't able to eat the food bee
and the other side was how sad t
took us a lot long to get it go.
Yeah, that's I see what you're saying.
So that's how you picked.
What goes into each of these
meals is by that survey
we talked to the family support workers,
we got recommendations and we
have a wonderful nutritionist
on our board that then takes,
didn't count all the calorie and
nutritious needs for that age.
And you can't do this obviously
without volunteers, right?
I mean, this seems like a huge undertaking,
especially during the pandemic
when you were feeding.
I mean so many children,
yes, and not just.
On the weekends or during
you were feeding every day.
We were taking 4000 bags to the
different meal sites and it was
so that all 40 meal sites could
have 100 bags at anyone time for
the children coming every day.
And we're looking at some of the
work that the volunteers are now
doing on a daily basis, getting,
I mean, this is a huge producti.
Yes, We have packing shifts
from 8:00 to 11:00 every day.
We have 20 volunteers.
Every day we have preppers that
are getting the racks ready
for the Packers for that menu.
The Packers are taking those
racks and packing bags.
And you're seeing here drivers,
those are our drivers that
are taking it to the schools
directly to the front office.
So there's no barriers for
the kids getting this food.
They're all volunteers,
over 150 a week.
I have a minivan I could drive for you.
I want it. OK. Minivans are my m
and you put everything in there. Well,
we put out close to 450 crates a week.
It's 3500 children that
we're serving every week.
Four school districts in King County,
85 schools, many different menu,
many different kids and we
have a lot more work to do.
I want to ask you how this is
distributed into the schools,
but I want to ask you first,
how do you get this food?
Do you go out and buy?
I mean I want to see the
grocery cart that what happens.
How do you get the food
into the facility? We
have moved far beyond grocery c.
We are in bulk buy with eight different
distributors all around the US o
get a good portion of it from Costco.
But distributors, we are always
chasing the best price and in f,
because we are purchasing at such a large
rate and getting such a great discount,
we have then in turn offered it
to other agencies doing this wok
so that they can save money.
We don't charge an admin fee.
If you as a person walked into
Costco and bought applesauce,
you're probably saying it saying
about $0.60 for one of these.
If you're now doing business Co,
you're probably sending only $0.40 for these.
If we buy it, we're getting it for like 30.
Cents because we're buying
pallet after pallet.
So if you have a program
that that doesn't have a lot,
you can't buy that much food.
So you can get it from us for that $0.30
and your money can go further to feed
more kids and that's what we all want.
My
goodness, I love having
you developed all of this,
just in the hopes of making sure
that this can be successful
and you can feed more children.
How many schools do you deliver?
And children overall?
85 schools for school districts,
3500 children a week,
yeah. This is impressive work.
How did you start Backpack Brigade and he,
you know, it seems like something Okay,
we're going to provide these me.
But even after everything you've
just talked about the distribut,
buying in book, you had to
have a lot of knowledge base.
I started at Zero Okay.
I was running a food bank and fr
training we went to these conferences and
I went to a breakout session and saw this
documentary called A Place at the Table.
And it followed several families that
were on food stamps and one famy
was in a food desert and they td
to a child who had no access to food.
The weekend. And they said,
how hard is it to to pay attention in class?
And she said it was really hardn
she pictured her teacher as a banana.
And here I am, 10 years later,
I'm still quoting that.
And Jeff Bridges was the narrat.
And he said if we allowed what r
children go through in any other country,
we'd go to
war. We'd go to war. And
that is still a quote.
So those two things.
I ran back to the food bank.
I'm like, Oh my God, is this re?
And let's just dove into it went next door.
There was one school.
I said, is this a thing?
Absolutely. How many kids?
What can I do?
I got food at the food bank.
And she said there's eight
kids that face weekend hunger,
which means some of the McKenna
Vento children that are identifd
as homeless with the definitionf
inadequate nighttime residents r
those on the free and reduced l.
Sometimes they're only eating at
school for the free and reduced lunch.
So Monday lunch,
I mean to Monday lunch to Monda,
Oh my gosh,
Friday, Friday lunch, Friday luh
is a long time. For a little
kids belly with a big brown,
I'm hugging you again for all of this
because you literally nearly made me cry.
No child should ever go hungry. All right.
If you are interested in donatig
or giving time to Backpack Brig,
just go to backpackbrigade.org.
Got or thank you.