Big inspiration in a little package

As some of you know, I am in my provisional year of the Junior League of Dallas. This has been a wonderful opportunity and has opened my eyes to a lot of different things going on in the Dallas community.

As part of my provisional requirements I have to do a service project. Part one of mine was today at the North Texas Food Bank.

I grew up in a very small, small town and to my knowledge there was no food bank, so all of this was new to me. I had no idea what to expect, but after today's eight hour shift I can tell you what I would have imagined would have been far off from what I actually encountered.

First, let's start off by the size of this place...big, huge, enormous...like 73,000 sq ft. of enormous! I was in awe at how a place this size runs like a well oiled machine with only a couple of actual employees! Amazing.

So...we go and are seated and this is where we learn that the other day a teacher found a child eating the paper off of his crayons. Upon further interrogation, the teacher finds out that the child is doing this because he is so hungry and does not know when he will get his next meal, much less what it will be. We learned that 1 in 5 children in North Texas are hungry. Starving. So much so that they would resort to eating paper. Heartbreaking.

Luckily there was help and this is where the NTFB comes in. They have a program called Food 4 Kids. This is what they called a "backpack" program. This program is for elementary school children and provides safe, easy food for them to have over the weekend so they don't have to worry about being hungry. This program currently serves over 200 schools in 17 districts and provides food to over 4,400 students every Friday. Amazing.

This program has no employees to "run" it. It is strictly done by volunteers, volunteers like us. So with a passion, me and 15 of my JLD buddies spent 3 hours this morning placing food in bags for children so they will not go hungry...but the story does not stop there. Here is the MOST amazing part.

Her name is Victoria and she is 10 years old. Deborah is Victoria's mother and today is her birthday. Victoria's birthday was three days ago, but her birthday party was today...at the NTFB. Yes, you read correctly. This beautiful, 10 year old little girl didn't want your typical "girly-girl" party. She wanted to help fight hunger. So she, her mom, dad, brother and a few friends were stationed with us as we helped fill the bags of food for elementary kids, kids who were her age, but were hungry. Not once did she complain when the "tiredness" of repetition set in. Not once.

We did many things today to help in the fight against hunger and we heard many statistics as to how much we helped (we packaged up over 80,000 lbs of food today, btw). But the one thing that I will never forget is this little girl, only 10 years old, making a BIG difference.

So thanks Victoria....you are an inspiration to us all.

**To learn more about the North Texas Food Bank and what you can do to help, please visit www.ntfb.org. Or visit your local Food Bank to help in the fight against hunger.