BOILING SPRINGS, N.C. — Many Americans are still struggling to put food on the table, a full four years after the global recession ended, a new poll by Gallup shows.
“Twenty percent of people polled last month said that they sometimes didn’t have enough money to buy food for themselves or their family, the highest percentage since 2011,” reported Jeff Black, staff writer for NBC news. “In addition, the poll indicates that Americans' ability to afford food has yet to recover to the levels seen in 2008, when the United States was in one of the deepest economic slumps since the Great Depression of the 1930s.”
Lou Ann Scates
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Susan Manahan
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Poverty remains the leading cause of hunger in the United States, with an estimated 40 million people living below the poverty line and at risk of going hungry. For America’s children, this means the meals they receive at school are likely the only food to which they have consistent access.
For Lou Ann Scates and Susan Manahan, on the staff of Baptist-affiliated Gardner-Webb University, the continuing problem of childhood hunger strikes her to the core.
“I’ve been passionate about this issue for years,” Scates says. “It hits me deep and pulls at my soul.”
She hopes a national initiative sponsored by Feeding America and promoted by the Food Network this month will remind people that hunger in America is a solvable problem.
Feeding America is the nation’s leading domestic hunger-relief charity. Its mission is to feed America’s hungry through a nationwide network of member food banks and to engage the country in the fight to end hunger.
The group has named September as Hunger Action Month, when the Feeding America nationwide network of food banks unite to urge individuals to take action in their communities. The mission is to create a movement that has a real and lasting impact toward the goal of ending hunger in America.
Scates hopes the campaign will shed light on the issue and instill in others a desire to become part of the solution at a grassroots level.
A few years ago, she and Gardner-Webb biology professor Susan Manahan read an article about the pandemic of child hunger, and both women immediately wanted to do something about it locally.
They put their heads together in 2010 and the result of their brainstorming is what is now known as the Bulldog Backpack program. The initiative provides non-perishable food items to hungry students at Springmore Elementary School in Boiling Springs and their families on a regular basis.
By working with the school’s social worker, Scates and Manahan identified approximately 20 children whose family situations were desperate. While the families can manage one modest meal each day, and students benefit from free and reduced breakfast and lunch programs at school, a family’s food resources often become most scarce over the weekend. Social workers say that’s when kids often go hungry.
To address this need, Manahan and Scates began collecting backpacks and food items from the Gardner-Webb community. Now, each Friday, the backpacks are stuffed with food and delivered to the students’ bus drivers, who give them to the students as they head home for the weekend.
“I often get a warm, happy feeling on Saturday mornings after I have delivered the backpacks, especially in the winter,” Manahan shared. “I am thinking that some child is drinking hot chocolate or eating hot cereal from the backpack when they might otherwise be going without.”
When the program first began, the backpacks were given to 15 families on a biweekly basis. Now, dozens of Gardner-Webb faculty, staff and students give regularly and several classes have embraced the project as a service-learning opportunity.
To continue making a difference, the Bulldog Backpack program is in constant need of food donations. Items needed include boxed juices, oatmeal with individual serving packs, mac-n-cheese singles, pop tarts, individual fruit cups, applesauce, spaghetti-o’s or ravioli, canned soup, pudding cups, nuts, trail mix, dried fruit, raisins, unpopped popcorn in small packages, Vienna sausages, franks and beans, breakfast bars and peanut butter crackers.
Donations are accepted in large receptacles outside the registrar’s office in the Dover Campus Center, and a food drive is currently being planned for Gardner-Webb’s Sept. 28 home football game against Point University. Members of the Ruby Hunt YMCA and the Boiling Springs Area Rotary Club have provided past donations and the GWU Chemistry Honor Society packed backpacks several times last academic year and will continue to assist with the project.
For more information on the Bulldog Backpack program, contact Lou Ann Scates at [email protected] or 704.406.4263, or Susan Manahan at [email protected] or 704. 406.4370.
Niki Bliss-Carroll is a staff writer in the Gardner-Webb University media relations office.