(Left to right) Tina Curtis of the FSP Foundation with Seymour Food 2 Kids Founders Mackenzie and Shannon Bullard.
SEYMOUR – A town nonprofit whose goal is to ensure that no Seymour child goes hungry will expand to another school, following an $8,000 donation that will enable them to feed more kids.
Resident Shannon Bullard and her daughter Mackenzie, 6, of Seymour Food 2 Kids, accepted the donation from The FSP Foundation in Orange.
Seymour resident Tina Curtis, an FSP Foundation board member, presented the Bullards with the check in July, saying FSP employees donate money from their weekly paychecks to lend families in their communities a helping hand.
“We help families and children in the communities where we work and live,” Curtis said. “This is very important to us.”
As a Seymour resident, Curtis was aware of the Seymour Food 2 Kids nonprofit, which Bullard started last year after Mackenzie was concerned that some of her fellow classmates at Bungay School had nothing to eat at snack time.
The $8,000 donation will expand the program beyond Bungay School.
“This is a game changer for Food 2 Kids,” Bullard told The Valley Indy. “This will allow us to expand into Chatfield-LoPresti School in a bigger way and add children at Bungay.”
When the program started last school year, Bullard said the organization was able to provide food bags to 10 kids at Bungay, sending them home with bags full of food and snacks every weekend for the entire school year.
Thanks to the FSP donation, Food 2 Kids will now be able to provide weekend food bags to 40 kids from both Bungay and Chatfield-LoPresti for the entire 2024 – 2025 school year, as well as create snack closets at both schools, according to Bullard.
“It costs approximately $320 to provide one child with weekend food bags for the school year,” Bullard said. “In conversations with both schools we came to learn that many teachers are buying snack supplies from their own pockets to provide to children during the school day. So, we will also be providing each school with some snacks that teachers can use to offset this expense to them.”
Mackenzie, who will be entering first grade this fall at Bungay, said being able to help even more kids makes her happy.
“It makes me feel proud and makes my heart happy,” Mackenzie said. “It is kind to do kind things for others because then other people do kind things for you when you need help.”
Bullard said a change to school lunch programs in 2023 – 2024 was put in place and families that didn’t qualify for free or reduced lunches were required to pay for student lunches again.
She said that fact, coupled with a 2021 ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed) Report, where she learned 40 percent of Seymour families struggle to put food on the table, led to the creation of Food 2 Kids.
Bullard looked to another Food 2 Kids nonprofit already in place in Milford in getting advice on how to launch one in Seymour.
The Seymour High School football team, which held a community fundraiser earlier this year, also donated $542 of the event’s proceeds to Food 2 Kids, which Bullard said translated to 67 bags of food to feed two children for an entire school year.
More information about Food 2 Kids and how you can help can be found online at www.Seymourfood2kids.org.
