Community Highlight: IM Kids 3rd Meal
Podcast Transcription
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Maddy: Hi everyone, welcome to another episode of PFCU’s Money talk podcast, I’m your host Maddy. For this episode I traveled to Ionia to sit down with Deb Wagner, the Director of Grants and Special Projects at the Ionia County Intermediate School District. I walked into this thinking that Deb only dealt with IM Kids 3rd Meal, which is what we talked about for this episode, but she has many other things under her umbrella and IM Kids 3rd Meal is just one special project that she works on and has been for several years. So, she shares what the program is all about and how you can volunteer or donate and if you would like more information, you can visit their website at imkids.org or follow them on Facebook to stay up-to-date on what’s happening. Without further ado, here’s Deb.
Deb: My name is Deb Wagner, I work for Ionia County Intermediate School District. I’ve been here since, well for 23 years and my job title is Director of Grants and Special Projects. IM kids 3rd Meal falls under special projects.
Maddy: Okay.
Deb: And we’ve had that program now, going into our 8th year.
Maddy: Wow, nice.
Deb: Yeah
Maddy: I didn’t realize you did so much more than just that. I guess I walked in thinking that that was what you did but you probably are busy with a lot of other things, right?
Deb: Yeah, and not only do I work for Ionia County ISD but in January, the two ISDs developed a partnership where now I’m Director of Grants and Special Projects at both ISDs. Or I’m working with them particularly in Grants but IM kids is also a special project that’s between the two IDs.
Maddy: Right. Okay, very nice! So, if you want to talk about IM Kids, maybe what it is, what you guys do, your goals, things like that. I would even love to hear how that got started 8 years ago.
Deb: Yep.
Maddy: That’d be great.
Deb: So, I’ll start with how the program got started. We knew that we had kids at our schools here in Ionia and Montcalm County that were food insecure. In fact, I had a principal call me and we were discussing the program- are we going to start that program? You know, I have a little boy who’s stealing milk every day and putting it in his backpack because he doesn’t have any food at home. And so, but that was sort of the thing that got us started on it and so we went to the board and talked about what we wanted to accomplish with the program and they said go ahead and we went ahead and did that. And we were, we had some grant money to start with, to get us started. We had a building because it ended up being a partnership between Ionia County Intermediate School District and Montcalm area Intermediate School District. And there’s a building, H.O. Steele building, that sits kind of in the middle of the two and it was empty so we decided to use that. So, we had to bring the kitchen back up to where it needed to be to be licensed because it is licensed by the health department and just get the building, the rooms that we use ready to go. We got a donation in terms of tables and chairs and things like that, from State Farm.
Maddy: Oh nice.
Deb: Yeah. So, we got everything going and we also, at the very beginning, got a walk-in cooler from the Greenville Area Community Foundation YAC and that’s what we started with. We started in April of 2014 and we had 10 weeks before school was out to see how, kind of a pilot, to see how it was going to go.
Maddy: Right.
Deb: So, we provide meals with volunteers, come in. We have a Facility Manager who manages the program, the daily operation and she recruits volunteers and makes sure, stays in communication with the schools in terms of their calendar and stuff, make sure that the meals get packed each day and we got going, you know, we got going, we got up and running. The schools come and pick up their meals and they identify their students because we wanted to hit not only free and reduced but those kids that are in those ALICE families. I don’t know if you are familiar with the term ALICE?
Maddy: No.
Deb: But they are working but they have limited resources
Maddy: Okay.
Deb: So, if a car breaks down or an unexpected doctor’s bill comes in, it could affect their whole budget and the first thing usually to go is food. They’re not always without food, in fact, none of our food insecure families are always without food, there’s food in the house at times but other times there’s not. And so, where was I going with that? Anyway, we started out with about 450 students that first year and before the pandemic we were almost 700, 674 I think.
Maddy: Wow, yeah.
Deb: And then the pandemic, we seen a drop because it was difficult to reach those students and then um now those numbers are going up. Since January this year, we’ve seen the numbers start to increase again. And so, we were expecting probably to get up to about 800-850 this school year.
Maddy: So, if a family wants to utilize this service, do they go to the school directly and the school kind of facilitates. You said they pick up the food and then the kids get it at the school.
Deb: Yeah, we don’t know the identity of the kids or anything like that. We work through our school contacts and it might be a principal, it might be a social worker, it depends from building to building who that person is but they identify their own students, they give us a number, I have 105 kids that need meals every day and then we make 105 meals for their building and then somebody comes and picks it up and they make sure the kids get it before the end of the day.
Maddy: Sounds like you guys, you know, you had this idea and then it just kind of blew up, it sounds like pretty quickly too.
Deb: Yes.
Maddy: Yeah, that’s amazing.
Deb: Yeah, and we just were able to get a box truck because what we’ve had to do is, we have a limited budget so we have to be very careful that we 1. Don’t over extend ourselves by taking too many schools and children and because once you start feeding kids, you don’t want to stop feeding them and then 2. To stretch our budget, we use feeding America. And before we had to rent our truck and find somebody to drive it or one of us drive it and go pick up our orders and we only did that a couple times a month because of the cost of renting the truck. Well, the Greenville Area Community Foundation gave us a matching grant, we were able to raise the matching dollars from sponsors and individuals here in the two counties and we put the box truck on the road this summer and we ran a summer program in all five of the communities. We service 12 schools but we’re in five different communities.
Maddy: Okay.
Deb: And we were able to do that for 8 weeks over the summer.
Maddy: So, you mentioned you service 12 schools, how can someone find out, get more information on if their school is serviced. Can they just pop on your website?
Deb: Yeah, it’s on our website. They can go to our website and check that out. Our website is IMKids.org, it has lots of information for instance, because we get a lot of food from Feeding America as well as from other vendors, we do a lot of repackaging because we buy in bulk. So, the first Wednesday of every month, in the evening, we have a repackaging event. You can sign up online or you can just show up, it helps to know how many people are coming so if you want to sign up online, that’s great. If you want to volunteer, you can call the facility or also, go ahead and sign up online as well.
Maddy: Okay. So, someone could just volunteer to help package food and repackage?
Deb: And make the meals, the sandwiches or pack the bags.
Maddy: Yeah, I feel like PFCU helped with that, maybe a year or two, maybe a longer time ago. We had a signup to come help and it sounded like it was a really neat
Deb: Yeah, we get a lot of groups that come in. Herbruck’s, they come in a lot, they’re one of the sponsors for the truck as well and they come in and bring a group. Now we don’t always do them on the first Wednesday of the month, we do that, you know, we will set up special dates for groups that want to come in.
Maddy: Okay, yeah.
Deb: Yeah.
Maddy: Anytime you can get an extra pair of hands, right? That’s helpful.
Deb: Yeah. One of our greatest worries when we first moved into H.O. Steele building was, will volunteers come because the program doesn’t work without volunteers.
Maddy: Right.
Deb: And that’s never been a problem. And we have two shifts for volunteers. If they want to volunteer from 9-11 or 11-1 or they need a timeframe within that, let’s say 10-11, we can accommodate that too. But we have a section of volunteers that make the sandwiches and we have another section that comes in and packs the bags with all the food.
Maddy: Nice, nice. How else can people donate, can people donate, I know I’ve seen like on your Facebook people donate, literally just food. I’m sure you take monetary donations as well.
Deb: Yup. Both are more than welcome. If you’re looking to donate food, anything that’s prepackaged lie crackers and cheese or the little cookie bags that we do or fruit snacks. Cereal, we make a trail mix and so different kinds of cereal are great for that. Anything like that is more than welcome. And if they wanted to donate, make a monetary donation, they can go to our website and it takes them to PayPal and they can just make it through PayPal or they can send a check here to IM Kids at 2191 Harwood, Ionia MI 48846. And any money that comes in from individuals or a community group goes toward our food. If we need something special like the box truck or a freezer, something like that, we do a campaign separate for that and I think that’s good for people to know, to know that their dollars are going to buy food for the children that receive the meals.
Maddy: Yeah! Do you guys have like special fundraising events every year that people can participate in?
Deb: Before the pandemic, we did what was called Banding Against Hunger and we usually did that in the fall and in the spring but with the pandemic, we haven’t restarted that yet. Yeah but we do have and really appreciate groups who run fundraisers for us. Like the chamber on Greenville when they did Party on Lafayette. They had did, what’s it called when they give half the money to the person and half goes to the… they collected money and half went to the person and half went to a nonprofit, we were the nonprofit. And the person who won gave us her money so we ended up
Maddy: Oh nice.
Deb: Yeah, with the whole amount of money that they collected. Or different groups that have done different kinds of fundraisers. Right now, there’s a group doing a food collection for fall. And we’re also thinking now that we have our truck, you know how they do fill the bus, so we’re thinking about maybe doing fill the truck.
Maddy: Oh yeah, that’s a good idea.
Deb: Yeah and then we’ve had groups that have done a peanut butter drive or a jelly drive for us so anything like that is more than appreciated. And so, we do do those types of fundraisers but a lot of our money comes from either grants or from individual donations or corporations, you know, different people who contribute to our program.
Maddy: Right. So, there’s lots of different opportunities for people to donate, participate. I think we did a, I think it was peanut butter and jelly drive. So yeah, it’s just neat to see people just come together and just drop off just gobs of food to go towards such a great cause.
Deb: And like I said, it’s very much appreciated. We just had the Ionia County Community Foundation YAC did a peanut drive just before they had the recall of JIF
Maddy: Oh yeah, oh my gosh.
Deb: So, we have like 486 jars of peanut butter that has to be dumped. And we tried working with the company but we have not heard back from them on whether they’re going to reimburse for those lost jars of peanut butter.
Maddy: It’s a little bit different when you have 400 and some to take back, rather than, like a household as one or two that you can return to the store. Oh my gosh, that’s too bad.
Deb: Yeah, it is because it would’ve been our peanut butter, enough peanut butter we would’ve had for the whole upcoming year.
Maddy: Yeah.
Deb: So, anybody that wants to do a peanut butter collection, we would more than welcome it.
Maddy: Accepting donations.
Deb: Yeah! We do peanut butter and jelly sandwiches three days a week and then we do lunchmeat twice a week and again that has to do with the cost.
Maddy: Right.
Deb: And we make families aware, as much as we’d like to serve everyone, we sometimes can’t accommodate allergies and we put that in our letter that goes out to the schools that they had out to parents. I wish we could, but you know, it’s not always possible.
Maddy: Right. So, website is a very good place for people to get information on donating, if their school is serviced, all of that and you guys do have a Facebook, right?
Deb: Yes, and our Facebook is very popular. We keep that updated as well so, you know, they can always go there as well and send us a message through Facebook as well.
Maddy: Okay, good! Is there anything else that you want to share?
Deb: Well, it’s just that we’re getting ready for the start of the school year, we know our numbers are going up because they’ve been going up since January. It’s really interesting as those programs started to drop off that we had during the pandemic, we started to see the numbers go up. And I also think with the high cost of living right now, you look at fuel and you look at groceries, things like that, it’s definitely going to push our numbers up. So, any type of support that the community could provide whether it’s a food or a monetary donation, it’s really important for us to get that right now.
Maddy: Okay, yeah, I mean you can’t go wrong with an organization like this, just providing meals for kids that need them.
Deb: Yeah.
Maddy: I mean, I really meant it when I said that you can’t go wrong with an organization like this. And thank you, Deb for taking a few minutes to chat with me about IM Kids 3rd Meal! Please visit their website at imkids.org to check them out, get more information and make sure to follow them on Facebook. And like Deb said, now that school is in full swing, they definitely need donations- especially peanut butter but really, any monetary donations or prepackaged food is greatly appreciated. Thanks for listening everyone and we’ll see you next time.
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