Earlier this year, we presented a story about East Bank Middle School and the issues they were facing with food insecurity for many of their students. That story generated a great deal of response from you, our faithful donors. We thought it would be advantageous to share an update with everyone now that the school year is over.

By helping the school purchase food for their in-house food pantry in February, over 30 kids were able to have access to food for the rest of the year on a daily basis, as well as receive take-home bags on Fridays, so they would have food over the weekend. We spoke with Nancy Kennedy again, a resource member of staff at East Bank, for the update on how the pantry functioned throughout the rest of the school year.

“With Union Mission’s help,” Nancy says, “we were able to buy larger quantities of food as well as more robust options. We have to keep the food choices simple when it comes to preparation. Most meals need to be shelf stable or eaten directly from the box. Some have access to microwaves,but we try to avoid providing anything that needs cooking preparation.”

She goes on to say, “The benefits of having more food didn’t just stop with providing meals to students. There were some incredible teaching moments for other students who helped prepare the take-home bags.” Nancy told a story about one middle school girl who was quite timid and withdrawn from the other students. She did, however, decide to volunteer to help assemble the food bags each week and that is when Nancy noticed a change.

“Zoe took charge of the entire process! After I explained how we were to assemble the bags, each bag gets 1 of this item and 2 of these items, etc, Zoe looked at me and said, ‘I got this Mrs. Nancy.’ and proceeded to organize all the other students helping. She had the process working so well after a couple weeks that all I had to do was check in on them from time to time. It was amazing to see how she responded to this effort.”

Zoe wasn’t the only student affected by this service. Many of the students took this activity seriously and really put forth their best effort to see that the pantry stayed organized and well stocked. Nancy also looked to students who normally wouldn’t be selected for
this type of activity.

She explains, “The default is to grab the students who are top of the class with the best grades and active in end of the year and they were elated to get them. I think it will have long term benefits for these kids.”

So what is next for East Bank Middle School and Union Mission? During the summer break, we are exploring additional ways we can help these students who face food insecurity. We want to be ready in mid August to pick back up where we left off and to expand opportunities where needed. We are also seeing that East Bank Middle School is not an anomaly when it comes to food issues for students. There are other schools in the region that need our help. When we look into more rural areas around the central part of the state, we see the need is even greater.

Jason Quintrell, President and CEO of UM, explains what he has been seeing from the administration level.

“Regardless of all the school food programs and all of the government assistance available these days, we are still seeing kids struggling with hunger in our state. It isn’t Union Mission’s responsibility to figure out what is going wrong at a political level. It is our responsibility to serve those in need. What we have been able to do at East Bank is proof that we need to get food directly into the hands of the kids and that is what we are going to focus on. Nancy’s position at the school is a temporary position where, eventually, funding will run out. We need to be prepared to fill that gap if/when it
happens.”

As a contributor to Union Mission, would you consider increasing your partnership with us? Your donation to our FOOD RELIEF fund allows us to not only serve East Bank, but other schools, day cares, preschools, etc that will allow us to get food into the hands of the children. Please consider helping us reach more kids during the 2023/24 school year.

many other things because they can
handle missing some class time and
it does not affect their studies. I
requested we try something a bit
different. We selected students who
did not meet that criteria but only
took them out of gym class for one
day a week. I saw many of those
students develop a sense of pride that
they were selected and were able to be
a part of helping other students. I
created certificates for them at the