In its second year, the employee-led Lozier Community Grant program supported 50 nonprofit organizations across the country. Recipients were selected by employee committees in all five Lozier locations. Over the next couple of months, the recipient organizations’ stories of impact will be shared on LozierLink.
Bright Futures started in 2010 as a way to help students succeed and graduate, by removing barriers to success. The next year, the Joplin, Missouri based nonprofit started receiving donations from around the world to help in recovery efforts after the 2011 tornado.
“We became a place for donations from around the world to land,” Executive Director Amanda Stone said. “Bright Futures kind of became a distribution center as well. We have the donation center and we have a place to keep all of those donations to provide them to students within 24 hours of being requested by a school counselor. About 7,800 students in the Joplin School District and about 60 percent are living in poverty.”
Bright Futures provides those students living in poverty with items they might need to be able to learn and grow alongside their peers. Stone says along with needing supplies, a portion of those students are food insecure. That’s where the programs’ weekend snack packs come in, where 10 percent of the students Bright Futures serves receive a snack pack.
“The weekend food program was one of the things from the beginning that kids have needed in this area,” Stone said. “When they’re away from school, they don’t have the stability of free and reduced lunch and free breakfast. And so that means when they don’t have that food at school, they don’t have food at home.”
Bright Futures has everything organized, a trail mix section; peanut butter section; popcorn section and more. Volunteers pull from those items for each week’s menu. Each week is planned out on the calendar, so volunteers can just pull those items off the shelf and have them all ready for packing for each team that comes in the packing.
“This is where the community support really comes in because we have rotating teams from the community help us out,” Stone said. “Different organizations come in and bring a team of people around five to 10 people and they grab a bag and make kind of an assembly line filling the snack packs.”
After tying it up each filled bag, it’s placed into bins to be distributed to each school. It’s a fast paced, well organized and well-oiled machine. The warehouse space, owned by the school district, holds all of the food for all of Joplin’s schools. The school district donated some space for Bright Futures to run its food distribution program out of. Stone says monetary donations are crucial to the snack pack’s program, in addition to food donations, as it allows Bright Futures to buy exactly what it needs to feed students.
“The Lozier grant allows us to buy what we need. That funding is so important, it allows us to purchase enough food to serve over 1,300 snack packs. That’s a huge number. That’s that’s going to serve 1,300 kids, for food over the weekend. Lozier’s donation was very important for our community.”
Click here to learn more information about Bright Futures Joplin. For details on the Lozier Community Grant program, click here.