The Gordon County Schools "Helping Hands Ending Hunger" Initiative

We need your help! Please consider donating directly to this Gordon County Schools food initiative. Let's stop food insecurities for our children in need. You can also use this link to donate through the Helping Hands website. All proceeds will go directly to feeding our Gordon County Schools community.

Participating Schools: Ashworth Middle School, Belwood Elementary, Fairmount Elementary, Red Bud Elementary, Sonoraville Elementary, Sonoraville High School, Tolbert, Elementary, and W.L. Swain Elementary.

Gordon County Schools has partnered with Helping Hands Ending Hunger to provide Gordon County families and students with nutritious food outside of the regular school day. In addition to providing breakfast and lunch at no cost to families in 2024-2025, 8 of our Gordon County Schools are helping those in need of meal choices at home through the Helping Hands Initiative.

Gordon County Schools is covering what costs it can, but we cannot do this alone. We are asking our community at large to come together and help change lives with nutritious meal opportunities for families in need of assistance.

A Mission to Prevent Food Insecurities

Gordon County Schools has exciting news to share with you! First, we would like to thank everyone who supports your school system as we seek to serve our community both in and out of the classroom. Community partnerships create opportunities to help the whole child, and we are looking to help our most disadvantaged students with socioeconomic supports.

We are starting an innovative, student-led program called Helping Hands Ending Hunger. This food-safe program, authorized by the Georgia Department of Education and Department of Public Health, recovers unopened, uneaten prepackaged food and fruit from school breakfasts and lunches—perfectly good food that would have otherwise been thrown away. Supplemented with other nutritious food Helping Hands purchases from the Atlanta Community Food Bank or donated by the community, this food is stored and sent home with students who otherwise would not have food to eat over the weekends and during school breaks.

Our school system has needs for a program like Helping Hands to help prevent food waste and lessen the number of our students who are food insecure. Students worried about where their next meal will come from, or who lack nutritious meal choices, face poorer health, perform worse at school, and are at risk for other underlying social problems. This program allows us to address a critical need and hopefully improve their success and happiness at school. The students involved in this program learn lifelong lessons of empathy, compassion, kindness, and leadership as they work toward helping feed our community. Helping Hands has been operating at other schools throughout Georgia with great success, and we would like to see that improvement here at our school as well.

The 8 schools participating in this initiative need specific supplies and donations for supplemental food. Our schools are asking that you help sponsor with either a monthly or one-time donation. Helping Hands Ending Hunger Inc. is a 501c3 charity; cash donations are tax deductible easily made to the school, you can utilize our PayPal service, or donate through the HHEH website (https://www.helpinghandsendinghunger.org/donate). Reference that the donation is for Gordon County Schools and 100% of the donation will be used for our program.

We know that it takes a community to raise a child; therefore, we would very much appreciate your support! Please call us at 706-629-7366 for more information about this innovative, important mission to feed our students in need.

Who Is "Helping Hands"

Helping Hands Ending Hunger began in a small, rural town in northwest Georgia as the result of Carla Harward’s effort to feed two little boys who had come to her daughter Sophie’s school on a Monday crying, their bellies hurt, because they hadn’t eaten any food over the weekend. Noting all the food waste that occurred in the school’s cafeteria during meals, Sophie posed a simple question that became the catalyst of HHEH’s programming: Why can’t we take the food that students throw away during breakfast and lunch and give it to that family so those little boys don’t go hungry? Turns out, long-enforced policy governing school nutrition programs (applicable nationwide) determined it was better to trash nutritious, edible food than to repurpose it to feed hungry children.

HHEH is a 501c3 nonprofit corporation established in 2016 with an inspired vision: to alleviate childhood food insecurity, reduce school food waste, encourage better educational outcomes, and shape a healthier world. HHEH's innovative, “Kids Helping Kids” program empowers student leaders to repurpose uneaten food from school meals and join hands with their communities to nurture food insecure families. Re-educating that food is medicine, not trash, is a primary focus. As a result of determined efforts measured to change existing policy, HHEH now offers the only program operating in Georgia which has been expressly reviewed and approved by the Dept. of Public Health and Dept. of Education/School Nutrition to rescue cold storage food (milk, cheese, yogurt, fruit, etc.) along with dry packaged foods and channel it to children when they need the most, over weekends and school breaks. A non-profit operating with strict food safety protocols, we remove the risk of liability for food donations under state and federal law. Moreover, with our unique student-led design, our program, once established in a school, requires minimal coordination from school staff and easily integrates into daily routines.

Further resolved to make significant differences in the quality of life for people living with food insecurity, HHEH employs a “whole family” focus, while encouraging everyone at participating schools to dispel stigma, change school climates, and develop parent/caregiver engagement for best outcomes. Partnerships with established nonprofits working to bridge need gaps for the same population HHEH serves expand outreach and effectiveness. By incorporating nutrition/healthy living components along with STEAM learning, soft-skill development, CTAE pathway, and other relevant curriculum (preK-12), HHEH strives to help students achieve their full human potential through education, stability, health, and well-being. Building community partnerships in each district we operate creates program sustainability.

Donate today and help us change lives!