More than 700 students receive food over 36 weekends throughout the school year, thanks to Feed a Hungry Child, a non-profit organization in Pickens County that has been feeding Pickens County students for the past 15 years. Founded by Kathy Brazinski, former longtime Principal at Albert R. Lewis Elementary School in Pickens, and businessman Milledge Cassell, former longtime owner of Pizza Inn in Pickens, the organization serves elementary, middle, and high schools throughout the county, as well as the Career Center and the Project Go Alternative Education Program housed in the former A.R. Lewis Elementary School building.

Bryan Hester, now Executive Director for Feed a Hungry Child, spoke with The Pickens County Chronicle about why he wanted to get involved. “I noticed that what they have done for over 15 years was very impactful in our schools in Pickens County, and I just love the actual mission of what they do,” Hester said. “And it’s been a blessing to be serving with such a wonderful board and people who are likeminded about helping children who do not have the adequate food they need over the weekends when they go home from school.

“We average a little over 700 children now per week when the school session is in, and we really have a real good feeling that it’s going to go up this year, maybe dramatically. We may hit 1,000 this next year. This is not exciting that we get to do this. We’re not excited that there is that need. We wish there wasn’t a need. We wish we didn’t even exist, but we’re very thankful that we have a way of getting food to these students over the weekend, and we have a lot of wonderful supporters, but we are always looking for more support, because we need it, with the need growing.”

Hester explained that some children live in a home with a single-parent income, or live with grandparents, and he said that more than 2,000 students “are without a fixed location over their heads,” the highest of any county in the state. “That was shocking to me,” he said. “Some of these kids could be living with their families in a car. Some of them may be living in hotel rooms.

“Housing and transportation are two of the biggest factors in what is causing a lot of trouble in Pickens County. It really is everywhere, but, here in Pickens County, because we’re so rural, it’s hard for these kids and families to operate when they don’t have transportation or they don’t have good housing.

“Single people are probably on the poverty line. Unless they are unusually making a lot of money, they’re right at the poverty line. Two incomes, even, for some couples, is very difficult today to even afford a house. If you look around Pickens County, you’ve got all this new construction going up, but a lot of it is rental property. You can’t even buy them. So, they know that something is happening in our culture right now. It’s not good. For us in South Carolina, the average person that’s working can’t afford the houses out here today, or even rental houses. It’s hard for them.”

Feed a Hungry Child purchases food from Second Harvest Food Bank of Metrolina in Charlotte, North Carolina. “They’ve been real good to us,” said Hester. About five or six volunteers deliver food to the schools. “On top of that, we may have to go out again during the month,” he said. “Some of the schools, we deliver to just one time a month, but some of the schools, we have to take two deliveries per month because, sometimes, they don’t have the room to store the food that we take. But, usually, it’s five or six people during the weeks that we deliver. We have other volunteers who will come in and help us pack at our warehouse. They help us pack some bags, some food, for middle and high school students. We take what we give to the elementary kids, and we bulk that up a little bit for the middle and high schoolers, to give them a little bit more food.”

Feed a Hungry Child delivers food not only to elementary schools, as in the beginning, but also now to middle schools and high schools. “We do every single school in Pickens County except for Dacusville Elementary and Dacusville Middle,” said Hester, “and the only reason we don’t do those is because, about the same time Feed a Hungry Child started, some churches got together out in the Dacusville area and are doing the same thing, and it’s led by Cross Roads Baptist Church in the Dacusville area. They do a wonderful job.

“In addition to what we do with the schools, we take snacks to all the school nurses in every school, even the Dacusville schools. We found that the nurses were having to buy snacks for the kids who would come by that needed something. They knew they were in need. We found that they were buying this out of their own pocket, so we are now helping with some snacks during the school year. When we take the deliveries, we take them some snacks.”

Anyone who wishes to volunteer may contact Feed a Hungry Child, as the organization is developing a volunteer list. “We don’t have a lot of volunteer opportunities, because we’re so sporadic about what we do,” said Hester. “We may get a food delivery this week. We may not deliver it for two more weeks. But, if anybody wants to volunteer, they can contact me. We’re developing a volunteer list that we would send out, if we had a time that, all of a sudden, we needed some people to pack, or we’ve got a date where we’re going to be packing some middle and high school packs, we would send that out and ask people to come and volunteer. So, if there is anybody that would like to do that, or be put on our volunteer list, they can contact me. We would love for them to.”

Donations are also taken on Feed a Hungry Child’s website, at www.pickenschildren.com. “They can make those through a PayPal account.” Said Hester, who added, “And. if they want to make it in any other way, they can contact us directly, and we can set up all kinds of ways they can pay.”

Brazinski spoke with The Chronicle about the beginning, before she retired as Principal at A.R. Lewis Elementary. “The health room was near my office,” she said. “I noticed there were kids going to the health room (to get food).” She said that she told the nurse, “Let’s track this. I want to know what class they’re coming out of, what days they’re coming the most, and what time they’re coming.” They did that for about three weeks, she said. “They were coming mostly on Monday mornings, first thing, to get food, because they had not eaten since lunch on Friday at school.” Brazinski secured a grant from the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, she said, “to feed those first 15 kids from A.R. Lewis.

“And Milledge called me, and he said, ‘I hear that you’re feeding kids on the weekend.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’ve got some.’ This was in the spring, and I retired in the summer. And he said, ‘Do you think when you retire we could do this all over Pickens County?’ And I said, ‘No, I’m retiring.’ And that was 15 years ago. Milledge and I teamed up, and I think he got our first $100 from a friend in Alaska.

“We started, and it was like, ‘How are we going to feed kids?’ We started with McKissick Elementary and feeding the kids on free lunch. We didn’t know who they were, but the schools did. So, we did a lot of praying and reaching out as best we could. And, suddenly, people wanted to help, and now we’ve really expanded. We had 100 kids, I think, the first year. And, now, we’re serving over 700. Our budget just for feeding the kids is about $20,000 a month. It’s really expensive, when you figure you’re feeding 700 kids every weekend.”

Brazinski said that Feed a Hungry Child gives nourishing food to the students. “One of our board members, the President this year, Martin Paine, his professional career was spent working with General Mills and Kelloggs, and so he’s gotten some contacts, and we’ve met with Second Harvest, and, instead of just buying only the bags of food that they have filled in, we’ll buy it by bulk, which is a lot less expensive, and bag it ourselves, so that we have a better choice. We try to get foods that kids will like and try to change it every so often. It might be every semester or three or four months, but we try to put some different foods in there, so they’re not getting the same thing the whole year.

“When we pack the bags for middle school and high school, we add more food than what we buy from Second Harvest, because they’re naturally bigger and need more. We’ve added the nurses in the last couple of years, because the nurses were putting in all of the snacks that they had, and it all came out of their pockets. So, now, we’re providing them with snacks. Some of the nurses will have the full bags, weekend bag with them, and we provide them with juices and water and things like that, that they need. Oftentimes, a student, particularly a high school student, if they’re hungry and want to pick up a bag, it can be a little embarrassing. So, they’re much more comfortable saying, ‘Can I go see the nurse?’ than ‘Can I go see the counselor?’  And so, they’ll go see the nurse and put a bag in their backpack and nobody knows the difference.”

Brazinski said that sometimes students will help pack the bags, for Feed a Hungry Child as well as for other volunteer opportunities, including this summer when she and her grandchildren helped pack bags for another program. “We did help out with a program this summer that was at different churches, not the SNAP program but one that the district helped the nutrition department, and so we volunteered at some of the churches and gave out food. People would pull up and get a week’s worth of food. But we did not provide the food. We just helped disperse it. We went one day to Arial Baptist, and one of my grandchildren helped disperse but the others packed bags. There was fresh fruit and chips and things like that. They packed bags for the next week. And, so, getting kids involved is a good service project.”

In addition to donations, Brazinski still writes grants for the non-profit organization. “I’m the grant writer, and we do get a tremendous amount of donations,” she said. “It’s only God-given. We’re very fortunate to have Bryan Hester to have joined us and to have an extra person who’s able to go out and evangelize, really, to tell people who we are and what we’re about. We have been so blessed with volunteers. It’s just been amazing. Milledge has done a tremendous amount of work. He works tirelessly. I don’t know what we would do without Milledge.”