Hi everybody! When my mom and I started the Geeky F@b Five series, we always knew that tackling student hunger was an important issue because it is a more common problem that I thought.
When I was is grade school, I had no idea that some of my classmates would get food on Fridays to last them the weekend because they didn’t have much food at home.
In my own school district and most schools in our community, school nurses keep a food pantry at the school. They hand out food on Fridays for kids so they don’t go hungry over the weekend. The kids don’t have to share their food with anyone. The meals consist of packaged and microwaveable foods like cheese and crackers, soups, cereal, and granola bars. When I volunteered with my mom at the River Bend Foodbank, we and hundreds of others, helped fill these weekend “backpack” food packages. It sure seemed to me not that wasn’t much food to have for 6 meals, but our food bank only has so much food to feed thousands of families every week.
To help combat student hunger, one of the most exciting projects in our community is called the “The Student Hunger Drive.” Schools compete to see which one can collect the most food and the winner gets a big party. In this book, we decided that the GF5 girls would focus on helping their new friend, Fiona, at their own school, Earhart Elementary.
Like Fiona, kids usually don’t like talking about their hunger. So we created her little brother, Freddy, who loves food and can’t stop talking about it! Fiona thinks he has a big mouth and is not ashamed at all. But what’s important is that the GF5 wanted to help their friends and all kids who depend on their school food pantry. Even Hubble, our snarky kitty, wants to help, so in the book, he has to get over himself and sacrifice his favorite thing for the cause!
I hope you enjoy this book! Does your school have a backpack program? To help maybe you and your friends could help donate time, food, money to your local food pantries to help students just like the Geeky F@b Five!
-Lucy