Fueled By Kids fills the 67 hour gap between when students (most of whom are participating in the National School Lunch Program) receive lunch on Friday afternoons and again when they receive breakfast on Monday morning, alleviating the food anxiety that many of these children experience as a result of not knowing where their next meal is coming from.

In the fall of 2016, I was sitting in a gym watching my brother’s basketball game. The lady sitting in front of us was showing photos of a cat she recently started fostering as a result of a family losing their housing on the West side of Manchester. Upon further discussion, we learned that the woman was a teacher at Parker Varney. Within her school, there were several homeless and semi-homeless families. Because of my (and my family’s) work with New Horizons, we asked about how this situation affected the kids in these homes. In her experience, it meant that many of these children did not eat over the weekend. Teachers slipped extra fruit from the cafeteria into these children’s bags on Friday in hopes that they would have something to eat over the weekend.

As I continued to have discussions with people about the issue of food insecurity in our community, everyone I talked to felt for the cause—they had a desire to help make a change but did not know where to start. So, we started Fueled By Kids! We are an organization that wants to address the food insecurity problems in our community. Having started with only the Parker Varney Elementary School, by the end of the school year we were able to add the Wilson Elementary School and Jewett Street Elementary Schools to our mission.

At the end of the school year, I had a meeting with each of these schools and discovered that the need for Fueled By Kids is even more widespread than we initially realized. We need YOU to help feed the hundreds of children in Manchester that go hungry each weekend.