Fueling young minds, that is the goal.
For a decade, the Second Harvest Food Bank has attended Orange County schools to deliver food to families so students go to class with full bellies ready to learn and succeed.
The regional food bank celebrated the anniversary this month of its mobile school pantry program at a distribution Wednesday, Sept. 11, at Oak View Elementary in Huntington Beach, one of the program’s inaugural dozen sites. In the decade since, the program has expanded to now 74 school sites in Orange County that host the mobile pantries one to two times a month. There are also seven permanent school pantries.
“When you are hungry, you can not perform at the highest level,” Ocean View School District Trustee Gina Clayton-Tarvin said as she watched fruits and vegetables, canned goods and more being distributed Wednesday to benefit about 150 families.
She’s been on the board for 12 years and is a teacher herself in another district and has seen, she said, what an empty stomach can mean for a child. “They can’t learn.”
But at Oak View, where nearly all of the school population is considered socio-economically disadvantaged by state standards, she said the students regularly outperform their peers in similarly challenged communities.
“We want to make sure that everybody in Huntington Beach,” she said, “has food, has sustenance and can provide for their families.”
Rebeca Isidoro, mother of two children Oak View and four more who had already gone through the school, said the program has helped her family and many more in the community. And over the years, she said, she’s seen it grow from the typical shelf-stable donations to fresh produce and ingredients the families can cook meals for their families with.
Also helpful has been having the resource so close to home.
And that is key said Claudia Bonilla Keller, CEO of Second Harvest.
“For us to be in community is the most dignified, compassionate and efficient way to distribute food to those who need it,” she said, adding that having the mobile pantries at schools helps expand Second Harvest’s reach, touching not just the students, but getting food to adults and children younger than school age.
She said schools will reach out to Second Harvest about hosting a food distribution program or the food bank will look for areas of the county that are underserved and approach local schools. There is a short waiting list and, she added, “Sadly we look like we have to expand with the need out there.”
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