Megan Navarro
KYLE — The state of Texas has the highest food insecurity in the nation, with 5.3 million residents facing it — rising from 16.4% to 17.6% this year — and 22.2% or one in five children experiencing hunger, according to Feeding Texas. Knowing these devastating numbers, one local nonprofit has been working with schools to ensure that every kid is fed throughout the week.
Previously, during his time as a pastor, Trey Williams and his family visited his sister for Thanksgiving outside of Denver, where a church service was held in the parking lot of a large apartment complex. The unique venue was due to the church’s goal of feeding 5,000 people for the holiday and the Williams family immediately jumped in to help.
Williams also discovered that the church had a program to send food home with kids who do not have enough to eat at home on the weekends — hearing this made him want to bring a similar idea to Central Texas.
“I felt like God was calling me out of being a pastor because He had something else for me,” Williams recalled from back in 2018.
He connected with Esperanza Orosco with Hays CISD, who had the same idea of launching a weekend food security program — HaysHope2Go — that was designed to help feed kids beyond what is served to them during the school day and they began working with Uhland Elementary School before the COVID-19 pandemic.
In order to have sufficient funding for both the programs in Central Texas, along with that in Guatemala — a special place for Williams that dates back to his time as a pastor — Williams launched his nonprofit, Ancora Ministries.
“The idea is that our kids eat free breakfast and lunch at school Monday through Friday. So, we know they're getting 10 meals a week that meet their nutritional requirements, but about 20% of the kids, more or less, that are getting free breakfast and lunch, that's kind of the baseline that we use like we know that those kids, it's not that the refrigerator is empty. It's just that there's not enough to eat,” Williams explained. “They might get a hot dog and chips or they're getting maybe a piece of chicken and something else, but they're never getting enough to eat where that feeling of being hungry goes away. So, the idea of our program is, let's fill those gaps to make sure that their tummies can be full on Saturday and Sunday, so that when they show up on Monday morning, they're not counting the minutes to lunchtime.”
There are 11 items in the food bags every week, with five different menu options, in order to give the kids variety, Williams said. The staple items include microwavable macaroni and cheese, ramen noodle cups and peanut butter cups. Other items that change from week to week are: two sweet snacks — cereal bars, fruit snacks, pudding, etc. — and two salty snacks, like Goldfish, popcorn and almonds, as well as alternating between animal or graham crackers.
The criteria Ancora Ministries uses for the food items it puts in the backpack bags is as follows:
• Non-perishable
• Kid-friendly
• Maintaining a $5 cost per bag
• Being able to fit the items in a plastic, non-see-through bag so that it can go inside a child’s backpack
• Name brands
“We want to feed them, but we also want to communicate to them, ‘You are worth Kellogg's. You are worth Kraft.’ It is worth paying a few cents extra on every bag to make these little micro-investments into their sense of self-worth week after week and year after year,” Williams said. “So, when someone asks me if they can do a food drive, I always tell them, ‘Yes and here are the only three things or four things that I want you to collect. And it has to be exactly [these] or we are not going to give it to our kids.’"
The program is not specific to one school district, as Williams stated that he got connected with Dripping Springs ISD in 2022, which wanted something similar, launching Dripping with Hope. There are also some campuses in Austin and Lockhart, as well as charter schools, that partner with the nonprofit.
All of the backpack food programs within Ancora Ministries that help with this are under the Feed Kids Right Now umbrella, but, because there are 52 schools that are involved, only a few have their own brand name.
Ancora Ministries works directly with the teachers and counselors at the schools to ensure that the students who are needing the extra help receive it, while also maintaining their privacy. Each school has a different culture, Williams said, so the nonprofit works with its partners to distribute the bags in a way that protects that.
“Once a week, we bring bins full of these backpack bags to each of our partner schools and our counselors and educators, they pass them out discreetly and each school kind of has their own way of doing it because we always want to protect the dignity of our kids. We want to make sure that they feel safe getting it,” Williams said. “We really rely on our schools to figure out the best way for their particular campus culture to distribute those bags, so that the kids aren't worried about being seen or outed for not having enough to eat.”
Another component of protecting the students’ privacy is that only the school partners know who the kids are, as Ancora Ministries is only given the number of students they need to provide for each week.
Since the beginning of the Feed Kids Right Now program, Ancora Ministries has helped serve approximately 700,000 meals to students in Central Texas and just this year alone, since January, 130,000 meals have been provided.
Williams explained that they also started sending out anonymous end-of-the-year surveys to students and educators “to make sure that we are doing the best that we can.” The feedback showed that last year, 55-60% of educators saw improvements — concentration, behavior, academic performance and health — in their students and those numbers have jumped to 60-70% this year.
“Week after week, year after year, we know that having a full tummy means you are at your best. If I don't have lunch, I'm grumpy and distracted and I'm a grown man. If I'm an eight-year-old kid and I'm dealing with that, what chance do I have, really, to be at my best? We're seeing this data from our educators saying: because these kids are getting this [food], their best is better than it used to be,” he said.
Ancora Ministries delivers the food bags to Hays CISD schools on Wednesday mornings and to Dripping Springs ISD, Lockhart, Austin and Kyle/Buda charter schools on Thursday mornings. Then, unless there is a holiday and it’s moved to a day prior, the schools distribute the bags to students on Fridays.
The nonprofit is funded through the “generosity of people who don't think kids should be hungry,” according to Williams, so donations are welcomed. For more information on the programs and Ancora Ministries, visit www.ancoraministries.org/home.
