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One in six Mecklenburg County children are at risk of going to bed hungry every night.
For many of them, school meals are an essential source of nutrition. But what about during Christmas break, or other times when schools are closed?
The Second Harvest Food Bank of Metrolina runs a program that sends food home with the neediest kids. The program provides backpacks full of ready-to-eat or easy-to-prepare food to homes of at-risk children.
The backpacks, distributed to children on weekends and holidays, contain foods such as peanut butter, tuna or chicken, breakfast bars, macaroni and cheese, soup, canned fruit, raisins and pudding cups.
On a recent Thursday, about a dozen employees from The Daniel Group, a consulting firm in the Elizabeth neighborhood, packed 507 backpacks in two hours for local children who might not have a meal at home.
"We have been very fortunate in that our business has been successful this year so, to the extent that we can give back to the community at a time when it's been very tough for people, I think we should," said Lynn Daniel, owner of The Daniel Group.
Daniel said his employees chose the charity and collected food and donations to give to Second Harvest to help hungry children through the Backpack Program, which is part of Second Harvest's Kids Café.
The Kids Café program started in 1989 as a response to two young brothers who broke into a Georgia community center kitchen in search of food. It became a national program in 1993 and now serves children in more than 80 cities in the United States, according to Second Harvest.
About 13.7 percent of the population in Second Harvest Food Bank of Metrolina's service area, including about 160,000 children and seniors, lives in poverty, according to Second Harvest.
There are 34,838 children in Mecklenburg County living at or below the poverty level. That is 16.7 percent of the child population in Mecklenburg County, according to Second Harvest.
"All of us are fortunate to be able to have food at least," Daniel said. "There are kids who really don't eat. The food they get at school when they leave on Friday may be all they have until Monday, when they get back to school. That's something we need to try to do something about."
In 2008-09, the Food Bank distributed more than 29 million pounds of food throughout its 19-county service region, including 7.9 million pounds of food to agencies in Mecklenburg County.
