ROCORI Action Packs Fights Weekend Hunger For Local Kids

COLD SPRING (WJON News) -- For 11 years, a Central Minnesota organization has been making sure school kids have a healthy meal over the weekend. ROCORI Action Packs started providing weekend meals to kids in 2014 and was one of the first organizations in the state to help do so. They started out small, doing 5 - 10 packs a week; now they provide about 100 meal packs a week.

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Director Carolyn Stang says their goal is to make sure kids are cared for:

"Really, our goal is that kids are feeling cared for and loved, and just have that food security.  Food security is such a basic need obviously, for children and for everybody, but it's a problem that a lot of kids can't solve on their own."

She says it takes a lot of teamwork to get all the meals ready. Stang says families sign up for the packs, and they work with ROCORI schools to get the meals distributed as discreetly as possible:

"We really do try to be respectful and discreet about how it's distributed, so children are not made to stand out or not questioned about what is that or what's going on, and they just know that they have that care and support of food over the weekend."

Stang says the packs have a variety of healthy food items but also some fun things they know the kids will like to eat, such as oatmeal, granola bars, fruit, soup, pasta, popcorn, and meat sticks. Stang says there are usually about 9 or 10 items each week in the packs to try to get the kids through the weekend. Over 11 years, ROCORI Action Packs has distributed over 35,000 meal packs.

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