One of our initial goals with starting Pasta with a Purpose at Bucci’s was to eliminate school lunch debt across all Marion County Schools by the end of the school year.

Thanks to your generous support, we have already raised thousands of dollars for local causes, including clearing the entire school lunch debt for Elgin School District. This is an incredible achievement—thank you!

However, we must admit that we significantly underestimated the total amount of school lunch debt in the county. The combined debt from two of the remaining three schools exceeds $12,000, with only about two weeks of school left. We are still waiting on the total from the third school.

***UPDATE - we got numbers back from the final school, and the outstanding total in Marion County is at $17,000.***

You may call us naive—it does take a certain naivety and blind optimism to open a restaurant. But we firmly believe in our community's ability to make a significant impact on this number.

We’ve launched a GoFundMe campaign aimed at knocking this amount down. We’ll update the goal once we get the balance of the final school.

Please let us know if you’d like your donation to go towards a specific school’s debt. If that school’s debt is paid off, we’ll allocate your donation to the other schools.

Thank you all in advance ❤️