By Scott D. Johnston
Green Lantern Lunches, the volunteer program that feeds hundreds of needy North Coast children, celebrated its third anniversary Monday, June 19, when delivery of free lunches started for about 450 children throughout the area. The Copalis Beach great-grandmother who founded the program hopes some additional volunteers will step forward to help meet the goal of 20,000 meals provided by the end of summer.
Phyllis Shaughnessy said they currently have 12 volunteers working out of her garage, which she converted into an assembly station and mini-warehouse last year. It’s a lean crew that takes on a big task Monday through Friday while kids are on summer vacation: some prepare and pack several hundred lunches, and others run four delivery routes that cover a mostly rural area from north of Moclips, south to Ocean Shores and east past Copalis Crossing.
“We hope we’ll be getting enough new volunteers that we can alternate packers and drivers,” she said. The delivery routes take at most about two hours each, and the prep and pack operation usually runs around 2 1/2 hours daily.
Shaughnessy said new volunteers do not have to sign up for five days a week, all summer long. Her group is happy to receive help for whatever OVERSET FOLLOWS:lengths of time people are available. She also noted that cash donations have made it possible to offer drivers reimbursement for gas “for those who would like.”
Anyone interested in the program can contact her at 360-289-2971 or by email at tcels@coastaccess.com. The program has a website, www.greenlanternlunches.org, a Facebook page, and a Gofundme account at www.gofundme.com/rurallunchprogram/donate.
Shaughnessy is well into her second decade of volunteering to help feed needy students. She noticed many relied on the free or reduced price lunch programs during the school year, but were going hungry during the summer vacation months. So she spent 11 years working with a USDA program to help get these children meals during the summer. But when the grant rules changed in 2014, it meant the kids needed to meet at a centralized location to receive a meal.
The new rules simply didn’t work for many of the families scattered through the North Coast area, so Shaughnessy joined up with a local church to receive a 501 3 (c) and a local tavern for space to begin assembling lunches. Each morning, Monday through Friday, Shaughnessy’s 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.
What started out as 100 lunches a day grew to over 200 daily, and a total of 10,006 by the end of the program’s first summer. Last summer they delivered 16,919 lunches.
The program has since outgrown the Green Lantern but kept the name. It’s also added weekend food deliveries during the school year, around 900 in 2015 and hugely expanded to 8,200 during the just completed 2016-17 school year.
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. She said volunteers are the backbone of the effort, but its success also comes from the simple, pure, straight-from-the-heart purpose: “Let’s go feed some kids,” the Lunch Lady exclaims.
