Small food nonprofit makes big difference in needy students’ lives

More than half of Osceola County elementary school students qualify for free and reduced lunch, which helps meet their needs while they’re at school. But on the weekends, many students go without enough food. When Sam Gilkey heard this in 2012, he knew he had to do something.

“When I first heard about this, it struck me as inconceivable,” Gilkey said. “We have so much in the area. It’s not that we don’t have the food. We don’t have the distribution. That’s always been the problem. People that need the food can’t get the food for one reason or another. Maybe they don’t have the money, or the wherewithal to go out and buy it, or something of that nature. I think I realized that personally and corporately as a church, we couldn’t feed everybody, but we might be able to feed and help some people.”

And that was the spark that ignited St. Cloud Cares, a local nonprofit organization funded by local donations. Three churches—Canoe Creek Christian, Cornerstone Family, and St. Luke and St. Peter Episcopal—initially came together to assemble CarePacks for three of St. Cloud’s elementary schools.

These CarePacks contain supplemental foods like peanut butter, granola bars, cans of tuna, macaroni and cheese, oatmeal and ravioli. The items are packed as compactly as possible in plastic grocery sacks, small enough to fit into a child’s backpack, and delivered to schools on Thursdays so students can receive them on Fridays to take home for the weekend.

By the end of the 2012 school year, St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church, Soul City Church, and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints had joined the effort, and St. Cloud Cares was delivering CarePacks to all nine of the St. Cloud area schools.

“If you tell people there’s a need, especially in the St. Cloud area, they’re very responsive to the need,” Gilkey said.

Each week, the group sends out almost 300 CarePacks, and last week it celebrated creating the 125,000th CarePack since their inception.

“There’s a lot of food insecurity in the area. Countywide, there are about 800 Families in Transition kids in Osceola County, of which we have 281 FIT kids in the nine schools we serve,” Gilkey said. And it isn’t just about feeding the students. There are studies which have been done that show that a child, especially in the elementary school, if they’re worried about where their next meal is going to come from, their ability to concentrate in school diminishes.

“My greatest desire would be to stand before you in five or six years and tell you, ‘We’re shutting down. We don’t need the program anymore.’ But here we are 12 years later, and we still need the program, so I don’t really see that this program or any program like it is going to end any time in the near future. There’s still a need. And we can’t do everything. But we can do a little. So, this is a little. This is a drop in the bucket.”

But as of last week, it’s 125,000 drops in the bucket.

For more information about St. Cloud Cares go to https://cornerstonefamily.com/pages/st-cloud-cares.