About Fueled By Kids

Our Mission

Fueled By Kids is an organization committed to ending childhood food insecurity.

What We Do And Why

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 mornings, alleviating the food anxiety that many of these children experience as a result of not knowing where their next meal is coming from.

Brie Klicker
General Manager

A Note From Brie Klicker

We began providing 65 bags a week for children at one school but have now grown to serve about 1150 children each week at 22 schools in the Manchester School District! Our amazing growth has been the product of school guidance counselors, principals, and the superintendent communicating with each other about the great results their kids have experienced and reaching out to us to help more children and more schools. We have lots of fantastic volunteers who help us pack and deliver the bags each week, and we appreciate their help more than they know!

However, the greatest challenge that Fueled by Kids faces is finding the money to support our program. The expenses of food grows as we try to reach out and help a greater number of children. Luckily, we are able to put 100% of monetary donations toward buying the food that goes inside our bags. To donate, visit the Donate tab of our website, where there are different options of how to donate. Call me or visit the Contact Us section of our website if you are interested in getting involved in other ways!

How We Got Started

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.

Over the next week, we reached out to more teachers and social workers. Through these conversations, we discovered that there were 62 children at the Parker Varney school alone who the social workers identified as likely to not have access to food over the weekend. The sadness of this situation drove us to create string bags, which we filled with food so that these children would be able to have meals throughout the following weekend.

“We are an organization that wants to address the food insecurity problems in our community.”

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 who go hungry each weekend.

Schools We Sponsor

We currently serve about 1150 students across the 22 schools listed below. If you would like your school to be sponsored, please contact us by phone, email, or the submission form on the contact page.