Sonia Spencer
The full-service food pantry at Mendota Elementary is open two days a week.
Last spring, Rachel Hahn hit a rough patch. Divorced, pregnant and unable to work, Hahn was “really struggling to make sure there was food on the table” for her three children.
“I was facing the fear of losing custody of my kids,” Hahn says.
A parent liaison at Mendota Elementary School — where Hahn’s kids were enrolled — threw the family a lifeline by connecting Hahn with Thea’s Table. Run by the Food for Thought Initiative, the program sends meals home on weekends to students and their families who are food insecure. Hahn used the program for three weeks before she became more financially secure.
The Food for Thought Initiative also runs food pantries in three schools and plans to add a pantry to one new school each year. The food is available to any student in need. And there are many in need. About half of the students in the Madison school district qualify for free or reduced lunches; the rate is higher in some schools like Mendota (75 percent). Another measure of poverty is homelessness. Every year well over 1,000 students in the district experience homelessness for at least part of the year.
“There is a lot of research that demonstrates the direct relationship between learning and hunger. Our effort is to ultimately get food in the hands of kids,” says Joel Wish, director of Food for Thought’s Sandburg Elementary School Food Pantry. “If you can’t get them now, if they’re hungry now, if they can’t learn now — how are they going to get ahead in their lives?”
As of mid-October, the school district had identified nearly 700 homeless students in the district. The district’s Jani Koester — who works with students experiencing homelessness — says that number will grow every day. By the end of last year, the district had identified about 1,400 homeless students.
The Food for Thought Initiative launched in February 2016 with a pantry in the school that has the most homeless students in the district: East High School. Jim Green, the director of that pantry, calls it a big success.
“After East started, the school district came to us and said, ‘We are interested in continuing to pursue panties in other schools,’” says Lea Aschkenase, the founder of the Food for Thought Initiative. “That sort of led to a formal agreement, a memorandum of understanding, between Food for Thought Initiative and the school district.”
Now, the district is determining which school will get the next pantry. Aschkenase says she should know in November what school is chosen. Already, Food for Thought has a grant to provide the necessary infrastructure — things like refrigerators and shelves — for the pantry to function.
Each pantry and program the initiative has launched is unique to the school it’s in. In East, there is an open pantry that any student can use. It also includes a service where teachers give snacks to hungry students.
“East’s population, since they’re adolescents, they’re hungry right now,” says Green. “They don’t usually think about what they want to eat tonight because they’re hungry at the time.”
Food for Thought’s two other pantries, in Sandburg and Mendota elementary schools, are a bit different. They both have a refrigerator, meaning they’re full-service and can store perishable items. Mendota’s pantry, which opened in late September, is open two days a week.
Thea’s Table is named after Aschkenase’s 94-year-old mom, who survived Auschwitz and has since dedicated herself to helping the hungry. This program, which Hahn used, provides food to families on weekends when the school pantries are closed.
Mary Lou Taylor, director of Thea’s Table, says the program feeds entire families, including parents and other children. It gives six meals to 30 families, which ends up being around 145 people, a week — that’s roughly 20,000 meals since the program started in November 2016, Taylor says.
“This is just for people who are the most food insecure,” Taylor says. “We carry them as long as they need to be.”
Hahn says her meals were healthy, including fruits and vegetables, but also had some treats for her children. “Kids shouldn’t have to worry about food in general, and they don’t usually have to think twice about it as long as there is something on the table,” Hahn says. “For them, the huge difference was going that extra step to provide a snack.”
Eyeing expansion, the program is now at a “pivotal point,” Wish says. Food for Thought has relied on grants for funding, but now the group is looking for community support. “One of the things we’re finding is that we can’t keep relying on writing grants,” Wish says.
Expenses for the organization, which is a nonprofit through the Goodman Community Center, can be significant. Food at full-service pantries in Mendota and Sandburg costs about $10,000 a year. Thea’s Table runs in the summer and typically costs a bit more, Aschkenase says. Food for East’s pantry is the cheapest of the bunch, totalling about $6,000 annually.
The organization is now fundraising, trying to get people to sponsor a week’s worth of food (typically $250) and looking for local businesses to partner with. The group won’t open new pantries unless it has the money to operate it for a full year — otherwise families could lose a resource they were counting on, Aschkenase says.
For Hahn, the resource made all the difference in the world. “Sometimes words can’t express the appreciation that I feel,” Hahn says. “I honestly just don’t know what I would have done if that resource wasn’t available.”