Some of the food provided in Second Havest’s Bite2Go program.
impact director for Second Harvest. “These are kids who are just not getting what they need.” That’s where Second Harvest comes in. For the 25 percent of children in the region that face chronic food shortages at home, school meals provide consistent nutrition, but what happens when those children go home? At Second Harvest, the Bite2Go program is helping fill that food gap. Bite2Go started at the Second Harvest distribution center in Spokane to provide students facing those chronic food shortages with meals they could prepare and eat on their own over the weekend. They launched Bite2Go out of the Pasco location in 2015. The first year in the Tri-Cities, five schools participated. In 2016, the number climbed to eight schools in the Tri-Cities, and this current school year, it exploded to 16 schools: 1,000 backpack kits a week. “We had a huge growth period, between people learning about it and sponsors 20
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coming forward,” Roth said. In Bite2Go, the students take home two breakfasts, two lunches and snacks for the weekend. All items are shelf stable – no worry for kids who forget to refrigerate anything – and no cooking is required. “As much as people can’t fathom the idea that there’s no electricity or no microwave, that happens,” she said. “The idea is not knowing what the situation is, the kids can open it and eat it.” Hundreds of school children receive the backpacks every week, both in the Tri-Cities and as far as Prosser and Walla Walla. The kits go out on Fridays, stocked with food children as young as 5 can open and eat on their own. Because the food needs to be the same for 500 children and be something that the children can eat on their own, Bite2Go is an anomaly in Second Harvest’s programming. Unlike most of Second Harvest’s operations, Bite2Go can’t be sourced through produce
donations from the local community and must be purchased and ordered. At Second Harvest, a fundamental goal is bringing together services to feed people in need, and, unfortunately, many of those are children. Food Sourcing Manager Sarah MacPherson says that encompasses services from setting up school pantries to deciding what foods go out in the Mobile Food Banks. During the summer, Second Harvest increases distribution of items like bread and tuna and peanut butter, so children can prepare their own meals. “One of the No. 1 barriers for low-income families is transportation,” Roth says, pointing to both food insecurity and the idea of a food desert, where families live farther away from healthy food sources. “Mobile is so important because we can take the food to them and make sure the food gets out to the people who need it.” That’s a familiar principle: it’s the same one that drives Bite2Go. About 20 percent of