By Patience Idegwu
Seattle Medium Intern
Last week, the Emergency Feeding Program (EFP) in partnership with Century Link, Albertsons, and Safeway distributed backpacks that included food and school supplies to children in low-income households who attend public schools in Renton and Seattle.
“We want to feed the body, but to also feed the mind. If you don’t have a good body then the mind is just a waste,” expressed Glenn Turner, Executive Director of the Emergency Feeding Program.
From warehouse to mouths, EFP wanted to create food assistance network that would provide high-quality food to all parts of King County. Over time, they started working with partner organizations in providing emergency nutritional responses to people in need.
According to the EFP website, “every year, we provide over 600,000 individual meals throughout our community. Our goal is that no one in King County will have to go hungry tonight.”
In an effort to expand their vision to feed and make sure our community does not go hungry, they decided to continue serving the most vulnerable generation – children.
To feed the mind, EFP has extended their ability to serve more kids. EFP joined with CenturyLink last month to deliver over 1,000 backpacks and snacks to the Seattle and Renton public schools.
Among the food juices, apples, granola bars, and traditional school supplies, CenturyLink also provided low-income families the lowest cost of internet packages. Any low-income family in these school districts was eligible for $10 a month internet plan.
Through CenturyLink, Leon McLaughlin, founder of Clean Water Foundation of Washington State, a non-profit organization that focuses on bringing clean water to communities in need, was able to get in contact with Glenn Turner. As a result, along with the backpacks, schools were able to receive clean water machine filters.
“A lot of these kids will not get these items without someone coming in and donating them. They go to school with minimal supplies to support them in their school year,” stated Turner.
Along with this recent partnership with CenturyLink, EFP has always met the needs of many children in school.
A few years ago, EFP partnered with Feed the Children, an organization to end childhood hunger,to start serving the younger generation. As it’s mission is the same as EFP, both organizations felt that they can accomplish a great amount.
“We partnered with Feed the Children because the opportunity allowed us to connect with organizations that supply paper, pencil, pens, notebook, and more,” said Turner. “We also thought it would be a great opportunity for us to be involved and lend more support to schools, as well as helping the kids get a good and solid education. We didn’t want them to have to worry.”
EFP has been helping schools in larger ways that would benefit many others not just the students. One of these, for example, was simply providing printing paper to public schools.
“In January [2016] we were approached by the public school districts. They said that they had run out of printing paper for the year; this was midyear,” said Turner. “For those schools and districts that required the printing paper, we were able to provide them with 130,000 papers for the school year.”
According to Turner, teachers had been using their own pocket money to cover and provide for all their students when there is a shortage. Teachers do this to also continue the teaching in their classrooms.
EFP does not only focus on meals, but school supplies and paper. This is another way that EFP feeds the mind, by helping and supplying much needed products to schools each year.
“We are an organization that wants to help. Sometimes resources are short but we can take the necessary steps to try to provide to the schools in the community with whatever they need,” expressed Turner.
“It’s challenging for all of us out here, but we have to learn to work together,” continued Turner. “Once we get to that point, we start to overpower our challenges and things then become easier. But to do that, we have to get people that are willing to step up and say ‘hey, let’s put our heads together.’”
EFP is hoping to continue collaborating with CenturyLink on a pilot program to adopt seven schools (three from Seattle and four from Renton) for a year-long program that will provide school supplies and food to the schools. These supplies and food will be distributed to low-income children for them to take home.
