Viking Vittles

Food insecurity for children is an issue in all of our local communities.  Many of the area school districts around us offer a weekend food backpack.  Before spring 2019, North Branch Area Schools was the only local district without a volunteer organization to help those students who experience hunger regularly.

In the spring of 2019 Trinity Lutheran Church formed an outreach committee to work on this issue.

Knowing the need was there we teamed with Family Pathways, North Branch Area Schools and Phoenix Academy to provide a weekend backpack program for any student that signed up.  We began by offering the program to Early Childhood students, Sunrise Elementary students and Phoenix Academy students.

Based on the information from other school programs, we were expecting 50-60 students to enroll.  By the end of the school year we had 194 students needing extra food support.  This number was far more than expected.  Our program distributed over 6200 bags of food with over 12,500 meals for students last school year.

This program was started with the intention that it would be a community-wide project lead by Trinity in partnership with Family Pathways and supported by the community.  During the 2019-2020 school year we were please to be supported by many churches,  businesses, individuals and civic organizations.  

As we all know, Covid-19 has had a profound impact on our economy.  We know that the need for food will be even grater during the 2020-2021 school year.  In order to make sure that we are able to serve every student wo is food insecure we will need all of the help we can get.

This program is run completely by volunteers with 100% of donations going to support the program. 

Please donate today.