Every Meal packs thousands of meals for kids

ROSEVILLE, Minn. — A metro nonprofit is taking on an important fight against child hunger.

Every Meal says more than 300,000 Minnesota kids face food insecurity.

Volunteers pack thousands of bags of food at Every Meal's warehouse in Roseville every week.

"Fruits, vegetables, protein, grains, pasta," said Rob Williams, Every Meal's founder and president. "Things you'd find in your kitchen cupboard at home."

The bags will end up with about 12,000 children from 375 different Minnesota schools who don't have enough to eat.

"When those kids leave school on Friday, they have our bags of food in their backpacks," Williams said. "They can take it home and have a consistent, stable source of nutrition over the weekend."

Williams calls it the weekend food gap: students get free meals at school, then struggle to eat well Saturday and Sunday.

"Some of them on Friday don't have anything to eat or just a few snacks until Monday, and we don't think that's ok," he said. "We're doing everything we can to change that."

Angela Antony has worked with Every Meal for three years as the social worker at Cedar Island Elementary in Maple Grove.

About 50 students there go home with food bags every Friday.

"Everywhere in the state of Minnesota where kids go to school, there's a need for food," Antony said. "We can't make assumptions based on what we think we know about a community or school population. The lovely thing about Every Meal is families don't need to qualify for this program. If they tell us they need the help, we get to trust them."

Every Meal relies heavily on donations of time and money.

Williams says with more of both, they could expand to some of the 159 schools on their waitlist.