Freestore Foodbank

1141 Central Parkway
Cincinnati, OH 45202

Power Pack - Childhood Hunger Prevention

Grant Application:

Freestore Foodbank’s Power Pack program began in 2004 and is based on Feeding America’s national BackPack initiative. Low-income children are fed daily through free/reduced-price school meals, which are only available on school days. During weekends and school breaks, these same children may be forced to skip meals due to lack of resources. The Power Pack program works with schools to provide packs of food assistance to food insecure children every Friday of the school year, to alleviate hunger on non-school days.

Funding from the Charles H. Dater Foundation will assist in ensuring the sustainability of the program, allowing us to commit to two new sites this year, expanding to meet the needs of local children. We are currently in the process of requesting applications from new and current sites and have already been in touch with new sites interested in joining.

Goals/Objectives:

Our long-term goals for the Power Pack program are:
1) to decrease childhood hunger in our region for the over 90,000 food-insecure children (source: Feeding America’s Map the Meal Gap)
2) encourage healthy eating habits; and
3) help food-insecure families to find stability.

In order to reach these goals, we work to improve childhood hunger programs, including the Power Pack program which is the largest and widest-reaching program in our organization.

During the 2022-2023 school year, we are projecting:
• 106 School sites
• 5,600 students served weekly (unduplicated)
• 212,000 distributed Power Packs during the school year

Grant Evaluation Report:

 We aimed to serve 5,600 weekly students through 106 school sites across 17 counties in Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana, providing vital nutrition to hungry children throughout the school year. Our goal for the program and this funding was to make sure food-insecure children received vital food assistance over the weekend to ensure their overall health and ability to learn, particularly on Monday mornings. To make this possible, we focused on the number of children served with our pre-packaged food assistance bags, which have a dozen healthy offerings to support supplemental needs over the weekend.

The Power Pack program served 101 sites and 5,500 children.

This past year, we continued to adapt models and processes to meet the changing needs of local children. Overall, grant funding supported just under the number of sites expected and most of the food items we anticipated, except Cheez-Its, which were not easily attainable due to supply chain issues and increased costs. With the removal of Cheez-Its from the pack, this grant funding remained critical as prices prose for nearly all other items.

Because of confidentiality issues dealing with schools and minors, we do not receive a complete list of pack recipients; only the total number of children served, and monthly reports on any changes, issues, or best practices will be shared with the network.

This year we have also seen an increase in the need for Power Packs. During most school years, we usually have 2-3 schools requesting a boost, but this school year, we have had over 20 schools needing additional packs. Additionally, we started the year with 101 Power Pack sites, and three have chosen to transition to our School Pantry program, indicating a community's larger need beyond the capacity and cost-effectiveness of the Power Pack program.

The pandemic completely changed how we support our community and continues to present challenges even as we enter the post-pandemic era. This has highlighted the importance of the Power Pack program and other feeding programs at school sites. We've seen more sites requesting increases in packs, and some areas are seeing enough of an increase that they have switched to our School Pantry program to support primarily older children and families. This has meant that everyone involved, from site coordinators to supplies, has worked harder than ever to ensure we can make these programs possible.

One of our site leaders had a student living with a grandparent on a fixed income with another 21-year-old grandchild also in the home and not working. This student mentioned to their teacher that they sometimes had no food in the house and no dinner the evening before or breakfast that morning. The teacher was well-equipped to handle this situation and immediately filled out a referral form.

Website: http://www.freestorefoodbank.org
Amount: $75,000
Date: May 2022