Ten years ago, children were caught digging through the dumpster behind a Grand Rapids elementary school. Troublemakers? No. They were looking for food. They were hungry.
Mary K. Hoodhood saw the children, asked the questions, got the answers, and didn’t settle for what she heard. What she learned was that for these children, the food they found in the trash was all they might get to eat when they went home after the school day was done. That year, 2003, Hoodhood started a program called Kids’ Food Basket, packing nutritious meals in paper sacks and delivering 125 of these sack suppers to children at three sites, including the school where she had seen the children digging through trash.
Ten years later, 2013, Kids’ Food Basket (KFB) is delivering sack suppers to 5,100 children at 36 schools in greater Grand Rapids and its newest satellite in Muskegon. In 2010, in fact, Hoodhood received the Presidential Citizen’s Medal from President Obama for her work with KFB. It’s cause for a celebration.
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