HELP US HELP FEEDING AMERICA FOOD BANKS FEED HUNGRY CHILDREN.
Over 15 million children in the US live with “Food Insecurity”. That’s 1 in every 5 or 20% of school age children. The result of this is weekends of probable hunger for these children, from school lunch on Fridays to school on Mondays.
Three out of four teachers report that children regularly come to school hungry. The result? Hungry kids often have lower grades, miss school more often due to sickness, and cannot learn as well as other students who might be better off.
THE BACK PACK/POWER PACK INITIATIVE
Food banks around the country are trying to address this problem with a program known as “Back Pack” or “Power Pack” which provides healthy packs of food on Fridays that supply approximately three meals for a child over the weekend. The difficulty, of course, is funding this program on a consistent basis.
Think about it this way …
If you’re a Teacher and you have 10 kids in your class who depend on a Power Pack to have some source of food after lunch on Friday and before Breakfast at school on Monday … but you only have one Power Pack to give away … how do you decide among all of your 10 students who qualify for that Power Pack, each just as deserving as the next, who do you choose? How do you pick the one child who gets to eat and then know that you’re responsible for the remaining nine who will likely go hungry?
So, what can we do?
We can partner with those already making it happen!
We believe that, with your help, we can start to alleviate this terrible situation by providing an annual influx of funds to Feeding America Food Banks by producing and selling a series of cook books called Dinner with Our Friends.
The Draw...
Ever Wish You Could Have a Recipe from a Great Chef?
All of our books will be high resolution, “coffee table” style books featuring a collection of donated recipes from friends who are well known chefs and leaders in the food service industry. We’ve asked them to share recipes they normally make only when they are cooking for their family and friends. We’ve also asked them to share a few personal photos and stories and they of course said yes. Every book sold will provide power packs for 5 children who would otherwise likely go hungry over a weekend.
How many kids can we help?
OUR PROJECTIONS
The Pilot Test will tell us if we’re on track to achieve our objectives listed below and will also show us where we need to adjust our projections before we expand nationally.
1st year: Test Market, our Sales will pay for One Extra Week of Power Packs for students in the Cincinnati/Dayton schools … that’s over 5,000 incremental packs
2nd year: Expansion. Following a successful test, our model tells us that we’ll be able to pay for 2,100,000 incremental Back Packs … that’s weekend food for a lot of kids who really need it.
3rd year: 2,800,000 incremental Back Packs nationally
Importantly, we have built Dinner With Our Friends so that once we launch a successful Pilot Test (early 2018) and a successful expansion (planned for Holiday, 2018) we will be a self-funded, stand-alone organization.
Here’s where we really need your help…
We are an official 501(c)(3) non-profit organization registered with the IRS and we have raised $18K to date. We need to raise an additional $60K to launch our Pilot Test.
The Cincinnati Freestore Foodbank is a strong supporter of our work and we have a robust distribution plan with a respected company acting as our partner in the appropriate markets.
Our research tells us that we can produce and sell our high resolution/quality books at a price point ($35.00) which is well below the average national price ($50.00) of this genre helping to make this broadly accessible and affordable while producing significant profits that will be donated directly to the local Foodbanks. We will track progress on our website so that our supporters can track our progress and we maintain full transparency.
Please join us in feeding hungry children in our communities and help them succeed in school and in life!
No donation is too small and we appreciate your support and interest.
Contribution Levels and thank you gifts associated with each level:
•Bread Level: $50 - $99 - Whisk key chain
•Appetizer Level: $100 - $499 - Bread level + signed copy of our book
•Salad Level: $500 -$999 - Appetizer level + invitation to recipe testing party
•Soup Level: $1000 - $2499 - Salad level + your name in our first cookbook as a founding partner
•Entree Level: $2500 - $5000 - Soup level + a copy of every new edition we ever print
•Dessert Level: $5000+ - Entree level + your name in all books & invitations to all recipe testing parties
This Project is our first step toward putting an end
to Childhood Food Insecurity.
We can only fix this if we all work together.
Thank you from the bottom of our hearts.
Light, Love and Pancakes,
Barbie, Steve and Dennis
Board of Directors
for more information please visit our website:
