Lansing Lunchbox continues to feed families

About two years ago, Toni Adams, Amy Frith, Linda Pasto and Susan Tabrizi, working under the umbrella of the Lansing Parent Teacher Organization (PTO), started the Lansing Lunchbox program to provide summer vacation breakfasts and lunches to more than 80 Lansing school students.

The children and their families qualified for free or reduced lunches through the school district for the academic year. The Lunchbox program sought to fill the summer gap in that support by providing monthly boxes of nonperishable food items like cereal, juice, pancake mix, canned tuna and chicken, soup, pasta, rice and beans, snacks and fresh fruit.

The first summer was a success, and the four volunteers were making plans to continue the program in the summer of 2020 when, as Tabrizi said, “a pandemic happened.”

There are no eligibility requirements beyond asking for help, Tabrizi said, and no identification required other than the last four digits of a phone number.

“I don’t know the names of any of these folks,” she said. “We want to make sure that people can come and not feel in any way that there’s a barrier.”

Originally, each family got the same box. Now, recipients go online to review the food items available and select what they need. Frith provides recipes to help organize the food in that week’s bags into meals.

Financial support from The Triad Foundation, the Kevin M. Snyder Memorial Foundation, Ithaca Rotary, The Plantsmen Nursery and the Lansing community funds the purchase of bulk food from the Food Bank of the Southern Tier and fresh bread and fruit from the Lansing Market.

Food is shipped to The Rink, where volunteers package the orders in a large space donated by the Community Recreation Center. Every two weeks, between 90 and 100 families come for their custom packed bags of groceries in a contact-free, drive-thru system.

“We’ve had tremendous community support, not only financial but the community rallying around what we are trying to do,” Tabrizi said. “It keeps us going.”

When a February snowstorm blocked the large, roll-up doors at The Rink and a truck from the Food Bank of the Southern Tier was scheduled to deliver pallets of food, “Scott Hicks told us ‘don’t worry about it,’ and he made a special path to the doors so the driver could get in,” Tabrizi said.

Each member of the team provides a unique set of skills and experiences, according to Tabrizi.

Adams is the director of the Lansing Food Pantry, Frith is an associate professor in nutrition and public health at Ithaca College, Pasto is active on local boards and coordinates fundraising, and Tabrizi directs operations and communications. Local volunteers help them stock shelves, prepare client orders and distribute food.

“We have grown and matured and learned lessons by doing and learning at the same time, refining our processes,” Tabrizi said. “And now, we have this thing down pretty well.”

The team operates on a set of guiding principles, Tabrizi said.

“Generosity, empathy, knowing that we could be there and dignity for our clients, our friends, neighbors, community members, providing food for kids in a way that continues to support people in our community with a smile,” she said.

Tabrizi said that the team operates on a three-month planning cycle. The current plan takes them through the end of June while allowing for uncertainty.

“We’re still responding to [the] pandemic,” Tabrizi said. “We’ve not seen the need diminish, and we will be here as long as people need us.”

Tabrizi reflected on the past year.

“If you had asked me in March of last year how long we’d be doing this, I would have said ‘until the crisis is over — maybe April,’” she said. “I didn’t know that we were talking about April 2021. But the issue of food insecurity is not going away. It was exacerbated by the pandemic, but it’s not something that is going to ‘switch off.’”

Tabrizi noted that kids who have enough quality food to eat are less stressed, are healthier and do better in school. And parents who can feed their kids have one less worry.

“The kid who sits next to my kid at school should not be hungry,” Tabrizi said.

You can help continue the Lansing Lunchbox by making a monetary donation:

• $10 sponsor a kid for two weeks
• $20 sponsor a kid for a month
• $50 sponsor a family of two for a month
• $100 sponsor a family of four for a month
• $500 super sponsor
• $1,000 lunchbox hero

Please send checks made out to Lansing PTO with Lansing Lunchbox in the memo line to Lansing Lunchbox, PO Box 243, Lansing, NY 14882.