2024 Catholic Schools Week Supplement
MTCA food pantries relieve hunger, stress of students and families
Teachers and staff of St. Matthew the Apostle School in Indianapolis assemble “birthday-in-a-box” kits for the food pantry at St. Philip Neri School in Indianapolis, a Mother Theodore Catholic Academy, on Dec. 5. (Submitted photo)
By Natalie Hoefer
A bag of snacks can go a long way to help a student facing food insecurity on the weekend.
A pantry with food staples and healthy options to help feed the whole family throughout the week can go even further.
Those benefits are being felt by families of students of the three Mother Theodore Catholic Academies (MTCA) in Indianapolis’ inner city.
With help from a donation, the Society of St. Vincent de Paul and Gleaners Food Bank, both in Indianapolis, two of the MTCA schools opened a food pantry for students’ families last fall, and the third is scheduled to open by February.
“Instead of buying retail, prepackaged snack food for a handful of students, we can provide much more food to every school family,” says Elizabeth Ewing, MTCA nutrition program manager. “And in addition to feeding [students] three meals a day, we’re able to provide them food for evenings and weekends.”
The new program is made possible in large part by a multi-year donation to purchase food for MTCA students at risk of the negative impacts from weekend food insecurity.
‘It’s a better fit for our families’
For the last several years, MTCA has had “a weekend program that was funded by a very generous donor where we had a team of volunteers assemble bags of kid-friendly food for students facing food insecurity on the weekends,” Ewing explains. “Those children were identified at each school by [its] social worker and principal.”
It was a helpful program, but Ewing desired to do more.
“Those kids getting bags, maybe they had siblings at home that weren’t getting a bag,” she says. “Now this child is obligated to share their food, so now we’re not even meeting the needs of that one child. Some children even felt the need to hide the food.”
What if there was a way to help not just more students but their families too? Ewing wondered.
She spoke with the donor about the idea of creating a pantry in each of the MTCA schools—Central Catholic, Holy Angels and St. Philip Neri—with the donated funds supplying healthy food and grocery basics for a student’s entire family.
“It gives the ability to provide food to students back to the parents,” Ewing says. “And it allows us to meet the need of the whole household, which in turn allows us to serve that individual child better.”
The donor was on board.
Gleaners donated a refrigerator, freezer and shelving for the pantry at St. Philip Neri, while St. Vincent de Paul and an associated donor provided the refrigerators, freezers shelving and more for Central Catholic’s and Holy Angels’ food pantries.
“With this equipment, instead of just offering shelf-stable food, we can provide milk, meat, eggs, cheese and other freezer and refrigerated items,” says Ewing. “It’s a better fit for our families.”
‘Worked out great to meet their needs’
To make the fit even better, each school can tailor how to operate its food pantry and offer demographic-specific food.
For instance, St. Philip Neri was able to create space enough to make theirs a client-choice pantry. It is open for two hours after student dismissal twice a month, “as well as on an as-needed basis if a family is in crisis,” Ewing notes.
At Central Catholic, the school “is full, jam packed—which is great,” says school social worker Kay Holland. “But we didn’t have space to do a client choice pantry.”
As coordinator of the food pantry, she devised a drive-through plan where 68 identified families receive a bag of food while picking up their children after school. She includes a recipe card that uses the items in that week’s bag.
Ewing stopped by one day to observe the process.
“They had families set up to receive food, and then there were a few additional families that walked up and said, ‘Hey, I’m not on the list to receive this week, but I need something,’ ” she says. “It worked out great to meet their needs.”
Food for the pantries is purchased at a reduced rate from Gleaners using funds from the food-designated donation. Each MTCA pantry coordinator orders separately, allowing them to provide food based on the unique needs and preferences of their school’s community.
Holland and Liz Davis, social worker and food pantry coordinator
for St. Philip Neri, appreciate the free milk, eggs and fresh produce that Gleaners also offers.
Davis says a recent delivery by Gleaners “had apples, melons, onions, blueberries and sweet potatoes. We set up five or six long tables at dismissal, so as families drove into the parking lot to get their kids, they could come get whatever they needed. We had enough for all of our families and nothing left over.”
Holland notes those are “the kind of expensive, healthy foods that are so good for us and that families struggle to get.”
‘They’re able to focus on school’
Such food is important for students and families on several levels.
“Physically, it just helps them be able to have that healthy body and healthy brain to learn,” says Holland.
And not being hungry helps students learn, Davis adds.
“If kids aren’t coming to school hungry or have to go home hungry in the evening, they’re able to focus on school,” she says. “That overall can have an impact on their academics.
“I think it has overall impact on mood, too. People joke about being ‘hangry’ [angry from hunger], but it’s true. If you’re hungry, you don’t want to do what you need to do. If that’s not an issue, students are more able to relax and take part in what’s happening in school.”
As for families, says Davis, “It’s good for them not to have to worry about where food will come from, so they don’t have to stretch their budget. If you have to worry about how basic needs will be met, that adds to all the other stressors they have in their lives. If we can relieve that in just this simple way, that’s huge.”
Even helping families provide a birthday celebration for their children helps relieve anxiety. The teachers and staff of St. Matthew the Apostle School in Indianapolis recently put together
60 “birthday-in-a-box” kits with everything needed to make a cake—including a foil pan—plus frosting, candles and a balloon, and donated them to St. Philip Neri’s pantry.
Ewing’s list of gratitude surrounding the MTCA food pantries is long. It includes the generosity of those donating funds and equipment, volunteers and her nutrition staff, who have “really gone above and beyond their duties as nutrition employees and serving our kids. I’m super proud of them, and I love the team—they’re very special people, and every day I’m just so grateful I get to work with MTCA.”
Perhaps most rewarding is the gratitude of the families.
“They are so grateful and awed by the food that we’re able to get them,” says Holland. “I get so many ‘Thank yous,’ ‘God bless yous’ and ‘This makes a big difference to my family.’
“It just makes me feel really good that we can do something so beneficial to our students and families.”
(For more information on Mother Theodore Catholic Academies, go to mtcaschools.org. To donate money for household items for the MTCA pantries such as paper towels, toilet paper, soap, laundry detergent, etc., contact Elizabeth Ewing at 317-236-1584 or eewing@archindy.org.) †
