The Inter-Faith Food Shuttle's BackPack Buddies program provides children from food-insecure homes with weekend meals during the school year. This is done by sending home backpacks filled with 6 nutitious meals and 2 healthy snacks with the children most in need at the end of every week. We are currently reaching over 1,350 children each week at 45 sites in all 7 counties that the Food Shuttle serves. This means that those 1,350 children now have healthy, nutritious food to eat over the weekend when otherwise, they may have gone hungry until their next meal at school on Monday. But 1 in 5 children under the age of 18 in the Triangle are considered hungry, and that number jumps to 1 in 4 for children under the age of 5. In an effort to grow the program to reach an even larger number of children we need more backpacks. Our goal is to give 1,600 children a backpack every weekend by the end of 2012.
How Can You Help?
We are always excepting new and used backpacks at both our Raleigh location and our Durham location. The addresses are below:
- Raleigh Location - 1001 Blair Dr., Raleigh, NC 27603 (Behind the State Farmer's Market)
- Durham Location - 1720 Guess Rd. Suite 14, Durham, NC 27701 (Northgate Mall)
What Kind Of Backpacks Do We Accept?
We can use any backpack as long as:
- The zipper works
- There are no holes in it for food to fall out
- Both the straps are fully intact
You can also sign up to volunteer with helping sort food and fill the backpacks for our Backpack Buddies here.
For any questions, please contact Amber@foodshuttle.org.
Thank you for all your support!