On Saturday, January 30, 2010, NBC Channel 30 featured the Junior League’s Backpack Program on CT News Today and on its 6 o'clock news program. Junior League members and local Boy Scouts were interviewed as they packed food and other items for distribution via the Backpack Program.
The Backpack Program is a project of the Junior League of Hartford in collaboration with Watkinson School and the Village for Families and Children. The program is designed to provide necessary food for children and their families at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary School in Hartford at times when the school-provided meals are not available. Each week, Junior League, Watkinson and other civic volunteers fill 25 backpacks with child-friendly, nonperishable, vitamin-fortified foods for the weekend. The backpacks contain enough to feed the child for two days and include food for at least one family meal. The backpacks are discreetly distributed to children on Friday afternoons and collected early the following week. In addition to food, the backpacks contain information about how to prepare healthy snacks or meals with the food provided, nutritional tips and non-food items such as toothbrushes, toothpaste, pencils, children's books, hats, mittens, and information on area social services and resources. It is estimated that the Backpack Program feeds over 100 individuals in Hartford each weekend.
Over the Holiday Season, the program added grocery store gift cards, hats, scarves and mittens to the Backpack Program’s regular food distributions. The gift cards supplemented the recipients’ limited food budgets during the school winter break. This allowed children and their families to make additional individual food choices to accommodate health, cultural, religious and familial needs during the holidays. The Hartford Courant published an article highlighting the Backpack Program and its activities over the Holiday Season.
The Backpack Program is run entirely by volunteers and is supported through donations and food and supply drives. One hundred percent of the funds raised for the Backpack Program go to feeding hungry children and their families in Hartford. Backpacks can be adopted for $14.00 per week. To learn more about how you can help feed children in Hartford, click here.
