by Amy L. Hatch
Ana Vieira was was doing outreach work for her church when she had her first personal and up-close view of what childhood hunger looks like in our community.
She was delivering food to a local family, she recalls, and was shocked by what she saw inside the average-looking suburban home.
“I remember we brought in five, gallon jugs of milk,” says the Champaign mother of two. “One of the older children was so happy, he kept yelling, ‘We’re having dinner tonight! We’re having dinner tonight!’”
That experience so moved Vieira that, three years ago, she and several other CU-area families came together to form Friends Against Children’s Empty Tummies (FACET), a grassroots organization that helps feed area kids.
FACET has successfully raised funds in conjunction with a national organization in the past, but more recently partnered with the Eastern Illinois Foodbank to help support the BackPack Program.
The BackPack Program identifies area schoolchildren who are at risk of being hungry over the weekend — kids whose main source of food is meals provided at school — and gives those children a backpack filled with food to take home with them each Friday that school is in session.
“Kids who are getting the free or reduced-price lunch are generally the population that’s at risk of hunger on weekends,” says Andrea Rundell, director of external and agency relations for the Eastern Illinois Foodbank.
Indicators for hunger in kids include an inability to pay attention, hoarding of food provided at school — and even obesity.
“We’re not talking about kids who look like stick figures,” Rundell says. “When we think of hungry kids, we think of victims of famine. Sometimes (hungry kids) are thin, but they can also be obese, because the food that their parents can afford to buy is often of such poor nutritional value.”
During the 2009-2010 school year, EIF fed 417 kids at seven school sites under the BackPack Program. It costs about $175 to feed one child for a year.
This year, FACET hopes to raise enough money at its annual fund-raiser to help feed an additional 10 children. The event will be held at Urbana’s Market at the Square from 7 a.m. to noon, on Saturday, Sept. 11, and will include an “Off The Beaten Path” bake sale, a basket raffle of goodies donated by local business, and a silent auction featuring an original painting donated by local artist Danielle Miller.
Raffle tickets will be available beginning Aug. 21 at the EIF booth at Market at the Square and bidding on the painting will start two weeks prior to the event. The piece will be on display at Indi Go in downtown Champaign.
Vieira points out that September is also Hunger Action Month, and that the timing was intentional. She also notes that it’s easy to overlook poverty and hunger in Champaign-Urbana, a community that often appears so prosperous from the outside looking in.
In fact, Champaign County has an 18 percent poverty rate, points out Cheryl Precious, director of marketing and development for the EIF.
“The poverty rate in Cook County is 15 percent,” Precious says. “People are often surprised to hear that, but there is a lot of rural poverty here, and there is a lot of extreme poverty, too.”
In 2010, a family of four with an income of $22,050 is living at the poverty level. Those who suffer from extreme poverty subsist on half of that, or less.
“The number of families living in extreme poverty here is the highest in the state,” Precious says.
That’s what motivates Vieira, who looks at her own two sons and can’t imagine what it feels like to know your child is hungry — and to know there is nothing you can do about it.
Again, she thinks about the family who started her on this path.
“The baby was so skinny you could see room between its legs and the diaper, and I had no idea this was happening here,” she says. “A lot of FACET’s mission isn’t just to raise money, but also to raise awareness.”
If you want to help support the BackPack Program, you can make a donation to the Eastern Illinois Foodbank online. Just type in the word “BACKPACK” in the comments section.
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