It was truly an honor to serve the Greater Lansing area schools with Weekend Survival Kits this past school year! We are looking forward to school year 2022- 2023 as our goal is to increase the number of Lansing School District Schools we serve. We currently distribute kits to about 80% of the schools in the Lansing District and are looking to increase that to 100%.
Here is a quick recap for our production/service for school year 2021-2022. The total number of food kits distributed was about 45,000. Each food kit contains two weekends worth of meal servings, so that is approximately 630,000 meals to hungry children! The average number of students served per distribution cycle was 2,500 and the number of schools served was 61.
New this past year, was a focused effort to serve schools with a need for “non-traditional” food choices. This was largely for schools which included refugee or other foreign country students with special dietary requests. In total we distributed 762 non-traditional food kits this year with the help of NorthWest Initiative and Sodexo Food Services.
And of course, our program would not exist without our volunteers! Last year we averaged 150 volunteers per month to complete the tasks of Packing, Loading and Delivering the kits twice a month throughout the school year.
Our packing and delivery dates for next school year will be posted on our social media and announced via a Newsletter in mid-August, so please stay tuned! To sign up for our quarterly newsletters, please visit our website at www.weekendsurvivalkits.org. If you are looking for a team building activity for your employees or other social group, check in with Kyla Parkllan, Director of Operations for Weekend survival kits for some special ideas. kyla@weekendsurvivalkits.org