Before COVID, Mid-Prairie Feed the Kids worked to confidentially put bags of food in the backpacks of food-insecure students during lunch, when all the students were out of the room so no one would know who needed food. But due to the pandemic, students were no longer leaving the classrooms at lunch, or were bringing their backpacks with them everywhere, so Feed the Kids had to pivot.

That’s when they started providing pop-up food pantries available throughout the community in order to feed hungry kids.

“For better or worse, last year COVID made us rethink everything we were doing in the school and Feed the Kids was not immune to that,” said Matt Freel, a behavioral interventionist at Mid-Prairie Middle and High Schools, who serves on the board of Feed the Kids.

“At the end of the 2020 school year, we gave out gift certificates to local grocery stores, just to make sure that kids had food while they weren’t here and while we couldn’t reach them,” Freel said. “Then, that turned into the pop-up food pantries where families could come and get an entire laundry basket full of food plus maybe a gift card to JWs or Freeman’s when it was Thanksgiving or Christmas so they could have money for holiday meals. It really turned out to be one of the greatest things we could have done. There were a lot of terrible things that came with COVID, but this allowed us to really step back and look and see are we really efficient with our time, are we super-efficient with our money?”

Feed the Kids now provides food in the nurses’ offices at each Mid-Prairie school building, as well as the pop-up pantries at the libraries in Kalona and Wellman, the Wellman skating rink, West Chester Exporter Elevator Co. and The Parlor at Cilino’s. They also provide summer lunch programs in Kalona and West Chester.

One of Feed the Kids’ most important fundraising opportunities is its annual dinner, which was held Saturday, Aug. 28 at the Wellman Parkside YMCA banquet room. Attendees were treated to pork loin meal and had the opportunity to bid on dozens of silent auction items, as well as a live auction to raise funds for Feed the Kids.

Event organizer Julie Gordinier said many members of the community aren’t fully aware of how much food insecurity effects students in the Mid-Prairie district.

“When we first started this, I also didn’t realize that there were a lot of kids who don’t know where their next meal is coming from, but if you talk to a teacher or anyone at the school, you hear stories about kids who come and have trouble learning because they’re so hungry or they’ve missed a meal and aren’t sure if they’re going to have dinner,” Gordinier said. “We just want to find ways to help them and give them resources to help the kids.”

And the community definitely came together on Saturday, to share a meal and also put its best effort forward to raise funds to help feed food insecure students in the district. Freel said the event has been “wildly successful” and the generosity of the community is a big reason that Feed the Kids has been able to expand its services to better serve the children.