Every Monday morning, a group of retirees in Palmetto’s Imperial Lakes community gathers to pack more than 600 weekend snack bags for students in Manatee County. It’s a quiet operation, but the impact is enormous, especially in a county where one in six children faces food insecurity.
The nonprofit behind the work is The Kind Mouse, founded in 2012 by Gina Wilkins. Originally based in Pinellas County, the organization expanded across the Sunshine Skyway into Manatee County and now feeds more than 650 children weekly. Volunteers deliver over 1,000 pounds of food each week to on-campus pantries at Manatee Elementary and Blanche Daughtry Elementary, using fresh produce from the Azinger Family Compassion Center. Because the food is distributed at school, working families don’t have to find transportation to a traditional food bank. The entire effort costs about $1,000 a week.
For volunteers like Diane Cressy, the work revealed something she hadn’t seen before. She describes realizing that hungry children were her neighbors, in her own zip code, right here on the Suncoast. If you’d like to help, The Kind Mouse accepts donations and volunteers, and every dollar stretches further than you might expect. What would it take for you to spend one Monday morning a month packing snack bags for local kids?
