Check out the video to find out more about how they ‘rescue’ the food.

Video credit: WSBT-TV

An Indiana school district will be served breakfast and lunch at school but may go hungry on nights and weekends. So, the school joined forces with an innovative nonprofit to ensures kids in need have enough to eat.

The Elkhart School District announced on Friday that they will now be working with Cultivate, a non-profit group that ‘rescues food, packages meals and serves meals to people who are food insecure’.  

At Woodland Elementary, 20 students will go home each Friday with meals for the weekend. Eight frozen meals will go into each backpack to carry the family through the weekend. This will go on until the end of the school year.

According to a statement from the district, Cultivate will rescue the unused food within the Elkhart Community Schools district to provide the meals.

The South Bend-based nonprofit called Cultivate collects leftover food from and repackages into take-home meals. The charity’s board president, Jim Conklin told WSBT how they do it. “Mostly, we rescue food that’s been made but never served by catering companies, large food service businesses, like the school system,” Conklin said.

Many school’s over-prepare foods and by saving the leftovers, the meals go back to the people they were originally prepared for kids. “Over-preparing is just part of what happens,” Conklin said. “We take well-prepared food, combine it with other food and make individual frozen meals out if it.”

The district said in the statement that Cultivate’s ‘’process has been reviewed and approved by the Elkhart County Health Department and Indiana Department of Education, and meets strict criteria to ensure safe food handling for students.’’

Natalie Bickel, who works for the school district’s student services department, told WSBT that they identified the need after they noticed they were wasting a lot of cafeteria food.

“It’s making a big impact,” said Melissa Ramey, who works for the town’s Chamber of Commerce. “It was heartbreaking to hear that children go home on the weekends and that they don’t have anything to eat.”

 

 

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