By Scott D. Johnston
The Green Lantern Lunch Program, the North Coast’s home grown all-volunteer effort, continues to help over 400 area students as it switched last week to its school year system of delivering weekend food packages.
The first were packed Thursday, Sept. 14, by several of the non-profit’s 30 volunteers, at the “Lantern Lunch Annex” garage building at the Copalis Beach home of founder Phyllis Shaughnessy. They were delivered Friday, Sept. 15, on four routes covering 204 miles, bringing two days of food to 429 “food insecure” children.
Last week, Shaughnessy sent a thank-you letter to volunteers and supporters, including two dozen mostly area businesses, organizations, clubs and groups, reporting on the recent efforts.
“We ended the summer having delivered 25,064 lunches to the area kids,” she wrote. That meant volunteers assembling “up to 520 lunches a day. The garage was indeed a bee hive of activity every morning…”
Shaughnessy started the program in 2015 after changes in USDA summer meal programs meant kids needed to meet at a centralized location to receive a meal, something that didn’t work for many of the families scattered through the rural North Coast area.
“Eighty percent of the kids in the North Beach School district qualify for free and reduced lunches during the school year. When school gets out on Fridays, and for the summer, many kids are unsure where their next meal will come from,” Shaughnessy explained on the group’s website:
www.greenlanternlunches.org.
She joined up with a local church for non-profit designation and a local tavern for space to begin assembling lunches. Each morning, Monday through Friday, a group of volunteers got together at 7 a.m. at the Green Lantern in Copalis Beach to pack the lunches to go out for delivery.
By the end of the program’s first summer, 10,006 lunches had been delivered. Last summer they delivered 16,919 lunches.
The goal of feeding kids was simple, but ultimately it required creating, on the fly, a 100% volunteer system that has grown to acquire, store, assemble and deliver over $5,000 worth of meals each week.
The program has outgrown the space at the Green Lantern but kept the name. It’s also added weekend food deliveries during the school year, around 900 in 2015, greatly expanded to 8,200 during the 2016-17 school year.
That number is expected to double in 2017-18. Shaughnessy said families who would like to start receiving free weekend food packages can sign up by contacting her at (360) 289-2791.
The weekend packs have two days of food per person, plus a few items like peanut butter, jelly and bread. The program’s cost for summer lunches was around $2.00 per person.
The weekend packs are a little bit higher.
Volunteers are driving the same four routes each Friday or Saturday this fall as they did Monday through Friday in the summer, covering Ocean Shores, Copalis Beach, Pacific Beach, Humptulips and areas around and in between.
Since its inception, the program has attracted increasing attention and support.
Last December, Shaughnessy received a $100,000 grant from The KIND Foundation, a non-profit begun by KIND Healthy Snacks.
The effort has also received grants from the Grays Harbor Community Foundation and the Seabrook Foundation, as well as ongoing support from businesses, organizations and individuals throughout the area.
Help has ranged from cash donations and cases of food to money raised by bingo games and flower sales. They have just started working with regional food bank supplier Coastal Harvest.
More information is available at www.greenlanternlunches.org, and on Facebook at Green Lantern Lunches.
Tax-deductable donations can be made at https://www.gofundme.com/rurallunchprogram, or can be mailed to: The Green Lantern Lunch Program, PO Box 443, Copalis Beach, WA 98535.
