Letters to the Editor published in the Sept. 16, 2020 issue of the Tomahawk Leader.
Backpack Program thank you, update
Dear people of Tomahawk,
We would like to thank you for your generous support of the Backpack Program for the past year through your generous donations of food and money during the Salvation Army Bell Ringing season and throughout the year.
Your donations have made it possible to feed 48 families over the entire school year and 23 families this summer. That was over 225 people for the school year and 115 people this summer.
We wanted to let you know how we have handled changes COVID had caused to the school year and what we plan to do for the next school year.
When school closed down in March, we had to scramble. Our model of picking up the backpacks at school, filling them, and then returning them to the students at school was not going to work. So we decided to mail home vouchers to be used at Trig’s for perishable and non-perishable foods. This amounted to between $26 and $35 a family per weekend.
The non-perishable food that we had at Grace House was slowly dispersed through Kinship on their food distribution days. Many of those families belong to the Backpack Program, and it was a good way to get food to people who needed it.
At the end of the school year, we got a list from the school of families that wanted to stay in the program for the summer and mailed them a voucher for every week of the summer. This will continue through September.
Our plan for the first quarter of school includes getting a new list of families that need food for the weekends to feed their children. Then we will start mailing vouchers to each family for each weekend. We have decided this is the best way to keep the people at school and our volunteers safe and healthy.
The program is continuing and we continue to need your support.
Thanks again,
Jean and Jeff Walker
Backpack Coordinators