Food For Thought lacks a lot of things, including salaries, fancy offices, a marketing team and workers with huge egos. But its members are full of determination, heart and can-do attitude.
The low-key nonprofit, working from its “headquarters” under the Colfax viaduct near Interstate 25, provides weekend meals for thousands of Denver’s poorest kids. Since its inception in 2011, Food For Thought has supplied food to 5,300 students enrolled at select Denver Public Schools institutes who otherwise might go hungry from Friday night until Monday morning.
Despite the state’s economic turnaround since the Great Recession, one in six Colorado children routinely faces hunger and lacks the fuel needed for academic success, according to Hunger Free Colorado, a statewide nonprofit that links families with food sources.
With little fanfare, Food For Thought volunteers gather every Friday morning, long before most of their peers have had their first cup of coffee. They form efficient assembly lines to package food and sort it onto delivery trucks. In its six years, Food For Thought has raised more than $500,000 to buy more than 903,000 pounds of food that it has handed out to the city’s neediest children.
“There are no agendas here,” said Jeff Steinhardt, who was hauling and packing food by 6:30 last Friday morning. Shortly after that, more than 130 people joined him, buoyed by rock music coming from an outdoor speaker.
“It’s just something you have to do, when you hear kiddos out there are hungry. You can’t turn away from that,” he said.
The group’s volunteers will fill 12,000 “power sacks” a month throughout the school year for distribution to 18 schools where a large percentage of students receive government-sponsored free or reduced-price lunches Monday to Friday.
In the past, weekend meals were few and far between for many of the kids, said Bob Bell, a Denver-area real estate broker who started Food For Thought with friend John Thielen. The average income for a family of four at the schools served by food program is about $29,000, he said.
Most people “can’t comprehend something like that,” Bell said. “I mean, most of us grew up in households where our biggest concerns were about what you are going to wear that day or what you will do tonight.”
Many of the children served by the organization live in motel rooms and have little access to nutritious food, or means of cooking food, during weekends. Some have absent parents who can’t or are unwilling to help feed them, he said.
Ellie Agar, spokeswoman for Hunger Free Colorado, said support programs like Food For Thought help families avoid resorting to serving kids cheap, processed foods that can lead to health problems.
“We know adequate nutrition is linked to fewer behavioral issues, better health outcomes and improved academic achievement in children,” Agar said.
All donations made to Food For Thought (facebook.com/FoodForThoughtDenver) go toward buying items from the Food Bank of the Rockies. The food bank can store items more safely and for much longer than Food For Thought, Bell said. And it’s an economical source of food for the meal packages.
A $4 Food for Thought “power sack” contains about 15 items such as beans, fruit sauce, animal crackers, pasta and sauce, peanut butter, tuna, macaroni and cheese, Ramen and Jell-O.
Volunteers — students, downtown workers and retirees — meet every Friday morning on property owned by the Auraria Campus to pack bags with food. The food sacks are then loaded into a fleet of donated trucks. Drivers truck the bins to participating schools.
The “power sacks” are met with the same enthusiasm as gifts on Christmas morning, said Deborah Miller, a retired DPS principal and Food For Thought volunteer.
“I had kids come into my office and ask me for some food, they were so hungry,” Miller said of her years on campus. “The parents love this program, because it gives them a lifeline.”
Food For Thought reaches so many families because it runs entirely on donated money and time, said Bell, who learned about Denver’s huge population of hungry children while serving in the Arvada Rotary Club. A teacher told him about her hungry students.
“So I sat down with her and said, ‘Is this true that the kids in your school are not eating on the weekend?’
“The story she told would just bring tears to your eyes,” he said. “You can’t hear those things and not do something. So we wanted something with no overhead, no B.S., just a lets-get-needy-kids-fed operation.”
A separate Denver group, Metro Ministries, regularly hands out weekend food bags to students at Swansea Elementary School. The nonprofit Jeffco Eats is a similar program that provides weekend meals to a large number of students who qualify for free or reduced-price meals at Jefferson County schools, director Barbara Moore said.
“Many of our schools in Lakewood have over 90 percent free- and reduced-lunch populations, and we have 3,000 homeless children in the Jefferson County Public Schools system,” Moore said. “Many people do not know that government does not give children food on weekends.”
Valverde Elementary principal Drew Schutz began receiving Food For Thought donations for the Denver school’s neediest students late last school year. It’s too soon to determine whether there are long-term results of the program, he said, but students’ attitudes have improved.
“I think they come in on Mondays better prepared and ready to learn,” Schutz said. “This program is fantastic, and we are glad we are part of it.”
