‘Until we’re not needed’: Food for Thought considers future as school programs pick up pace
SOUTH HERO – After years of working with families to address food insecurity in the Champlain Islands, Kaight Althoff recently told The Islander that she and the volunteers working with Food for Thought had an interesting question on their hands.
In the years since the Congregational Church of South Hero began sharing food and books with families during the summer, local nonprofits and in particular schools have improved their plans for distributing food for families affected by the summertime lull in school programming and school-provided meals.
With hundreds of families now covered by the Grand Isle Supervisory Union’s weekly food distributions in Alburgh and Grand Isle, Althoff said Food for Thought might finally be able to wind down.
“Our whole goal is to work ourselves out of a job,” Althoff told The Islander. “The whole goal was to do this until we’re not needed.”
Started nearly two decades ago by Althoff through the Congregational Church of South Hero, Food for Thought is a summertime program distributing food and books for children in Grand Isle County.
Every week between June and August, the program donates food and age-appropriate books to qualifying families at distribution sites hosted by the Congregational Church of South Hero and the Islands in the Sun Senior Center in Alburgh.
According to Althoff, the program has been geared primarily around children’s tastes, with organizers selecting foods like granola bars and cereals that children enjoy and that would be easy for a child at home to either access or prepare on their own. More recently, the program has also been arranged to compliment the summertime meal kits distributed weekly through the Grand Isle Supervisory Union.
On Thursday last week, Food for Thought’s volunteers packed food boxes with applesauce and cereal bars. Volunteers like Gretchen Patterson and Judy Albert also packed eggs purchased from Giroux’s Poultry Farm in Chazy, as well as lettuce from Sandy Bottom Farm in Isle La Motte and peas from Blue Heron Farm in Grand Isle.
“It’s important to support local farmers,” Althoff said. “We like to keep our dollars close.”
In a few boxes bound for families in Alburgh, volunteers slotted away a few books from a small collection Food for Thought had purchased for its participating families. Those families had only just registered for Food for Thought earlier that week, according to Althoff, and had missed the initial book donations Food for Thought had included with its food boxes the week before.
In all, volunteers had arranged food boxes for 20 families in Grand Isle County. The weekly distribution was expected to serve more than 40 children across the Champlain Islands.
Food for Thought is available for families qualifying for the federal government’s National School Lunch Program, which affords free and reduced-price school lunches for children whose families’ household incomes fall within a certain percentage of the federal poverty line. Since its founding, Althoff said Food for Thought has rarely, if ever, turned away a family.
“Our assumption is that, if people need food, we’ll give it to them,” Althoff told The Islander. “We assume, if they’re reaching out to us, it’s because they need help.”
While Grand Isle County is generally seen as wealthier than other Vermont counties, with household incomes and home prices often outpacing statewide averages, the county has also faced observable challenges with hunger.
According to U.S. Census Bureau data presented by Feeding America, approximately one in every ten households in Grand Isle County wrestles with food insecurity. An even larger share of households with children reportedly faced challenges with food access, according to Feeding America, and schools across the county have reported large shares of students qualifying for the National School Lunch Program.
Food programs serving Northwest Vermont have also reported an increased demand for assistance in recent months as families wrestle with higher food and fuel prices. Organizers managing the Champlain Islands Food Shelf recently told The Islander that, while weekly demand has remained steady since the COVID-19 pandemic, the food shelf has seen a larger share of new users and families with children.
“I see a lot of people we haven’t seen before,” the Champlain Islands Food Shelf’s Diane Bahrenburg told The Islander in May. “People are still really careful and not taking too much, but they’re saying, ‘Gee, my dollars just don’t go as far.’”
Summer in particular can be difficult for families wrestling with food insecurity. According to organizers working with food shelves and other food assistance programs, families can face an increased risk for hunger during the summer months when children no longer have access to the free breakfasts and lunches offered during the school year and families have to absorb the added costs of summer meals.
It was concern with childhood hunger that initially pushed Althoff to work with the Congregational Church of South Hero to create Food for Thought nearly two decades ago.
“The numbers just haunted me,” she recalled. “There are so many hungry kids.”
In recent years, however, Althoff said community organizations in Grand Isle County, and in particular the Grand Isle Supervisory Union, have been able to ramp up their summer food programming.
The supervisory union recently began its second year hosting weekly summertime food distributions at its schools in Alburgh and Grand Isle. Every Thursday, the schools invite families with children either 18 years old or younger to register with the district’s summer lunch program and pick up a week’s worth of food prepared by the Burlington School Food Project regardless of a household’s income.
At its height the year before, according to local officials, the Grand Isle Supervisory Union’s summertime food program could distribute enough food for more than 250 children in Grand Isle County every week.
Herself a member of the school board in South Hero, Althoff said the weekly food distributions organized by the supervisory union were able to reach more families than Food for Thought. The South Hero-based program was already advertising the schools’ food distributions to its own clientele.
With other programs better equipped to distribute food across the Champlain Islands, Althoff said Food for Thought might transition away from summer meals to focus on either books or the shorter vacations scattered throughout the school year.
It seemed to Althoff, the longtime Food for Thought coordinator offered during an interview, that Food for Thought might no longer be needed to feed children during the Champlain Islands’ long summers.
“That’s our goal, really,” Althoff asserted for The Islander. “To see that we’re not needed.”
