Food Bank's Backpack Program for students celebrates 20 years
As soon as he got home from school at the end of each week, Elijah Riley would sneak up to his room to tear into the backpack full of food he had been given at school.
Inside he would find granola bars, fruit snacks and cereal — all of which he would stash away to snack on himself or break out the next time his friends came over. Then, he'd pull out significantly less-exciting items from the backpack, like pasta, bread and canned goods. These, he would give to his mom without a second thought.
At the time, Riley, now entering his final year at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, never understood why he was getting the weekly bags of food in the basement level of Randolph Elementary, or what his mom did with the food he gave her. His young mind couldn't comprehend that the pasta turned into spaghetti and the loaf of bread turned into things like toast and sandwiches.
It wasn't until later that Riley realized the bundles of "goodies" from the Food Bank of Lincoln's Backpack Program helped his mom ensure there was a meal on the table every night for him and his seven older siblings.
"Through that, we kind of needed a lot more than me, as an elementary school student, could understand," he said. "And the Backpack Program gave us those resources and those tools to still put food on the table and to have what we needed to get by."
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Backpack Program, which has sent a total of 1.5 million bags of food home with students, like Riley, since it began in 2004.
At the end of each week, students at participating schools are able to pick up a grocery bag of food, which they then put in their backpacks, to help families who may be experiencing food insecurity get through the upcoming weekend.
An average bag typically contains a box of granola bars, two tins of tuna, a can of soup, several pieces of fruit, a boxed pasta meal and a voucher to purchase a jug of milk.
In the 20 years since the program was implemented, it has seen immense growth, said Kati Umberger, youth and senior programs manager at the Food Bank. In its first year, the program served around 50 students at Clinton Elementary. Now, it hands out more than 2,100 bags of food each week to students in need in nearly 30 different communities in southeastern Nebraska.
As a coordinator at Clinton in 2004, Diana Pasco was well aware of the need for extra help many families in the community had. So when her principal at the time came to her with the idea of creating a program in partnership with the Food Bank to distribute food to families in need, she was instantly on board.
Now, to know the program she helped start 20 years ago has since served nearly 45,000 students over the years, is surreal, she said. Pasco never imagined it would grow this big.
"It grew really fast," she said. "I was pretty surprised at how fast it took off. I didn't foresee that."
Over the years, food insecurity in Lincoln has had fairly steady growth, especially during the COVID pandemic, Umberger said.
In response, the Food Bank has since expanded its youth and family services to include both school food markets and food pantries, in addition to the Backpack Program, to better serve a variety of different families' needs.
For many families with elementary-aged students, the Backpack Program is sufficient. But as students get older, families may benefit more from a monthly food market, where they're able to collect more food and pick out the items themselves. On the other hand, some families just need a quick stop to a school food pantry, where they can browse a variety of shelf-staple items and grab what they need.
"There's no one-size-fits-all model," Umberger said. "So we're happy to be able to offer a variety of resources that focus on childhood hunger, including the Backpack Program."
The program can offer a wide variety of benefits to both students and their families, according to Umberger. But most importantly, the program has helped ensure students across Lincoln and the surrounding area have been well fed for the past 20 years.
"We want kids to be able to focus on being kids. There are so many struggles that an individual faces on a day-to-day basis, we want to try our hardest to make sure that having food on the table is not one of them," she said. "We just want to make sure that we have healthy, happy kids who have enough to eat."
For Riley, the Backpack Program had a big impact on his life, even if he didn't realize it at the time. When he left Randolph and moved on to Lefler Middle School and eventually Lincoln High School, his family continued to use the Food Bank's resources by getting food at the monthly food markets.
Now, he wants to give back to the community that gave so much to him growing up through his nonprofit Big Gumdrop Outdoors , which is aimed at helping underprivileged kids take advantage of the outdoors.
"As a kid, being able to enjoy those resources and being able to be better off because of someone else's giving and someone else's generosity, I want to be able to do that back to my community," he said. "(I want) to let other kids come up with similar stories, so once they're old and successful, they can look back positively on programs and people that were trying to help them out when they were growing up, too."
Reach Jenna Ebbers at 402-473-2657 or .
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