Community Corner

Gifts of Love's Weekend Backpack Program Expanding to Charter Oak International Academy

Program provides food to help struggling families through the weekend.

While subsidized lunches and breakfast programs help feed kids for whom food is scarce at home during the school week, heading for the bus on Friday can mean facing two days of hunger.

But Gifts of Love's Weekend Food Backpack program helps alleviate that hunger and now the nonprofit is bringing the program to West Hartford's Charter Oak International Academy.

The program works subtly so student recipients remain anonymous. Gifts of Love drops off backpacks filled with easy-to-prepare food to feed the students' families over the weekend and snacks for the week. Students pick them up in the office on Friday afternoon and return them empty on Monday morning to be refilled for the following week. 

The program runs through the entire school year thanks to volunteers and has grown from 2 to 100 backpacks over the past six years. Backpacks are distributed in Avon, Simsbury, Farmington, West Hartford and Canton.

To accomodate the expansion of the Weekend Backpack and other programs, Gifts of Love will be moving to a new location in June. For more information or to help, visit www.giftsoflovect.org.


Get more local news delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for free Patch newsletters and alerts.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here