Kids should worry about being kids and not where their next meal is coming from.
Blessings in a Backpack provides weekend food to students in elementary schools who have food insecurities when they're not in school.
While Blessings in a Backpack - Rancho Cordova is part of a national organization. Each chapter is responsible to raise the funds required to make our programs work.
We are currently sending weekend food bags home with 250 students from 7 of our local elementary schools. Pre-Covid 19 we were sending home 320 bags home from 7 schools. As the students come back to school, we hope we can get the food back into the hands of the students that we're not able to now.
We are feeding over 88,000 children across 46 states and Washington, DC. To learn more about Blessings in a Backpack please visit our national website via this link. 
www.BlessingsinaBackpack.org
Our last event was December 19, 2020 when we partnered with Unity of Sacramento and hosted our 1st Toy/Grocery Giveaway.
We were able to provide a bag of groceries, a $15 Safeway gift card, Vera Bradley backpacks, stuffed animals provided by Pet Smart, comic books, coloring books & crayons, misc. stocking stuffers, hand sanitizer and masks.
We had great community partners in Grocery Outlet in Rosemont, Blue Shield, Domino's Pizza and Pet Smart. With their help we were able to provide for 150 families.
March thru June of 2020 we held a drive through at St. John Vianney's church to pass out weekend food bags. We upped our game and provided a weekend bag for any children 18 years and under. In this 3 month period we passed out 5,157 weekend food bags. Most weeks we had a cool surprise for the kids too. We collected used books and gave away over 1,000 books. Street chalk, big bubbles, and stuffed animals were also passed out to the kids. Domino’s Pizza supplied pizzas and each car was given a pizza for lunch.
We could not have done either of these without the help of our volunteers!
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We sent our 1st weekend food bags home in April 2014 to 30 Cordova Villa Elementary School students. Hubby and I packed the bags in our dining room with the help of our granddaughters, their Mom, and my neighbor's granddaughter. Family and friends helped us with the funds which enabled us to buy the food required to get started. The following school year we were able to send weekend food bags home for over 200 students at Cordova Villa, but we found out we were feeding kids that wanted the food and not necessarily the kids that needed the food. We learned a valuable lesson and found the next school year there were 60 students that needed the food. This allowed us to add two more elementary schools, Williamson Elementary and Rancho Cordova Elementary schools. Since we started through December 2020, we have provided 53,600 hungry free weekends to children in our local communities.
With a lot of help from our community partners over the next several years we were able to add White Rock, Cordova Meadows, Cordova Gardens Elementary schools and two schools in Folsom, Blanche Sprentz and Theodore Judah. We grew to sending home 320 weekend food bags each Friday and then Covid-19 hit us. A few of the schools are not back with us yet which allowed us to add Pasadena Avenue Elementary School which is in the San Juan Unified School District.
Since we started in April 2014 we have provided 53.600 hungry-free weekends to kids right here in Rancho Cordova and again we would have never been able to do this without the help of our communities!
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We believe that KIDS HELPING KIDS helps to create kindness and we love using children whenever we can. On top of all the good feels that come from volunteering it can only help to create more kindness which our world can sure use.
From our 1st weekend food bags, that we packed in our livingroom with the help of my grandgirls & my neighbor's granddaughter, we have used kids to help us with our endeavors. The 1st few years we had volunteers come to our foodlocker to help pack the weekly bags but even when we moved packing of the bags to each school kids were packing them Well, that is until Covid hit us! While we couldn't get together to pack bags or have the students do it for us families in Folsom stepped up and packed them for us.
Over the last seven years our junior volunteers show up at every event we have and they do whatever is asked of them. I believe if I did a poll our annual charity golf tournament would be their favorite. We are very thankful to the parents who are instilling in their children the importance of giving back and we love when the entire family shows up to help.
Clicking here will take you to see out junior volunteers at work.
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