SEGMENT 1: The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that in 2022, one in every five children in the United States was unsure where, when, or even if they would get their next meal. Childhood food insecurity significantly impacts physical, social, cognitive, and behavioral development.
Blessings in a Backpack has become a national leader and model for fighting food insecurity in kids and working to put them on the path to a healthy start by providing hungry children with backpacks filled with nutritious food items – enough to last from when a child leaves school on Friday until they return the following Monday.
SEGMENT 2: Nemours Children’s Health Assistant Vice President and Chief Patient Experience Officer Dr. Peggy Greco outlines what she sees as the three most important influences on a child’s mental and emotional health.
Guests:
Beth Bush, National Director of Athletic & Strategic Partnerships, Blessings in a Backpack
Peggy Parish, Community Engagement Director, Nemours Children’s Health, Florida
Peggy Greco, PhD, Assistant Vice President, Chief Patient Experience Officer, Nemours Children’s Health
Producer, Host: Carol Vassar
EPISODE 43 TRANSCRIPT
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Welcome to Well Beyond Medicine, the Nemours Children’s Health Podcast. Each week we’ll explore anything and everything related to the 80% of child health impacts that occur outside the doctor’s office. I’m your host, Carol Vassar. And now that you are here, let’s go.
Beth Bush, Blessings in a Backpack:
Honestly, it just started with one woman who was volunteering at a school and had an apple with her at lunch. And a little girl asked if she could take it home with her.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
A school volunteer, a hungry student, and a single apple: simply put, that is the origin story of one organization, Blessings in a Backpack, that has set its sights on fighting the burden of childhood food insecurity, that according to Beth Bush, whose voice you just heard. Beth is the organization’s Director of Athletic and Strategic Partnerships. We’ll hear more from her, along with the Nemours Children’s Health Florida Director of Community Relations, Peggy Parish, about childhood food insecurity in a few moments.
We’ll also talk with Nemours’ Assistant Vice President and Chief Patient Experience Officer, Dr. Peggy Greco, about the three most important influences on a child’s mental and emotional health. And as you can probably guess, food insecurity is among them. So, let’s jump into that topic.
The US Department of Agriculture reports that in 2022, 1 in every five children in the US was unsure where, when, or even if they would get their next meal. That’s 13 million hungry children. Food insecurity has significant negative implications on a child’s physical, social, cognitive, and behavioral development. Blessings in a Backpack is fighting food insecurity in kids and working to put them on the path to a healthy start by providing them with backpacks filled with nutritious food items.
Enough to last from the time a child leaves school on Friday until he or she returns the following Monday. Blessings in a Backpack was the brainchild of founder Missy Hammerstrom, the volunteer who 15 years ago discovered that elementary school students in her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, were coming to school hungry on Mondays because they lacked sufficient nutrition over the weekends. Now serving over 90,000 children in more than 1000 schools each week during the school year, Blessings in a Backpack has become a national leader and model for feeding children who would otherwise go hungry.
At a Blessings in a Backpack food packing event held at Nemours Children’s Health Florida in Jacksonville, we sat down with Beth Bush and Peggy Parish to talk about childhood food insecurity as a social determinant of health and the vast networks of partnerships required to make certain that children in our nation are as well-fed as possible. We began our conversation by discussing the key factors contributing to childhood food insecurity. Here’s Peggy Parish.
Peggy Parish, Nemours Children’s Health:
Well, the cost of almost everything has been increasing, and some parents have lost their job, or their salary has not been increasing with the cost of everything going up. So more and more families are in a difficult situation. They have to decide if they pay their rent or their mortgage so they have a place to live. Do they pay the electric bills so they keep the lights on? Do I buy the medicine that my child needs? And usually, food is one of the last things.
So, more and more families are finding themselves food insecure. Here in Florida, over 613,000 kids don’t know where they’re getting their next meal. Locally here in Jacksonville, that’s one in five children.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
One in five children don’t know where their next meal is coming from. That is an amazing fact to me that there are children who go to bed hungry in one of the world’s most rich nations. Let’s talk about what food insecurity does to children in terms of their physical health, their mental health, and their emotional wellbeing. Beth?
Beth Bush, Blessings in a Backpack:
Yes. Physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing is all affected. Physical health, they’re lethargic. They just simply don’t want to get up and go. But on a more serious note, it’s been linked to adverse overall health, such as diabetes and high blood pressure for children. You’ve got mental health, higher risk of anxiety and depression up to almost 300% more chance of a child developing that with no food: emotional wellbeing, mood swings, lack of ability to focus.
In simple terms, I’d like to say it’s like the Snickers commercial. They’re just hangry and the kids can’t be kids when they’re hungry.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Peggy?
Peggy Parish, Nemours Children’s Health:
When we think about being hungry, we think about having that empty stomach. But, like Beth said, it’s so much more than that. Kids can’t be kids when they are hungry. They can’t focus. Their behavior decreases. They’re sad or depressed or have anxiety. It impacts their overall behavior, and that’s really when we think about what we’re doing at Nemours for our patients; we know we deliver great care, but we want to do more. We want to go out into the community and help as many kids as we can. So, that requires us to think differently.
We think about leaving the walls of our hospitals and our clinics and go out to where the kids are, in this case, in the schools. Helping those kids who are on the free lunch program to ensure they have food over the weekend so when they come back to school on Monday, they’re ready to learn.
Beth Bush, Blessings in a Backpack:
That is an extremely important part of our mission. It’s 65 hours from their last meal on Friday before they come back to school for breakfast on Monday. So these kids, for whatever reason, there’s all kinds of different reasons why they’re not having either food or access to enough food to get them through the 65 hours. So we found that these kids either don’t show up for school or when they get there, they’re just trying to focus on getting through the day.
I mean, they all have a different way of lashing out if they’re hungry. And teachers are just doing everything they can to get the kids through the school day, much less teach them. It’s almost like they’re babysitting or childcare because these children are not prepared to be mentally in the classroom.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
It’s almost as though kids need food as a very… We all need food as a very basic and vital part of life. We’re setting them up for success if they are well-fed, and if they’re not well-fed, we’re setting them up for failure in many ways.
Beth Bush, Blessings in a Backpack:
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Let’s talk about stigma. I know that there is stigma that surrounds food insecurity, stigma around maybe mom or dad doesn’t make enough money to buy the food that we need. How does that impact families wanting to seek help? Beth?
Beth Bush, Blessings in a Backpack:
When kids leave school on Friday with Blessings in a Backpack food in their backpack, we make sure it’s completely discreet. We, as an organization, have no idea the name or face of the child. We just trust the administrators to give it to the most needy children. There is no need to make a special trip to another location to get the food either. We just want to make it as easy as possible for them.
When we talk to the schools, they say that their attendance is up on Friday because the kids want to come get the food, and then it’s also attendance is up on Monday because they’ve eaten food. But these kids are really proud to take this food home. It’s really for them; it’s supposed to be an individual pack of food for them, but we find that these kids are sharing the food with siblings. They’re proud to say, “Hey, you don’t have to take care of me, mom and dad, today.
I’ve got my own stash of food. You go do you and get your job done, and whatever you need to buy for the family house, that’s fine.” Our campaign slogan for the year is, “Food is the most essential school supply,” because it is. You can’t read and write if you’re hungry. So it’s important, and the stigma is real, but we try to make it as discreet as possible.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Beth, talk about nationally how COVID-19 impacted food insecurity in general, especially within the childhood age range.
Beth Bush, Blessings in a Backpack:
Well, when COVID hit, everyone was shutting down, slowing down, most people weren’t working. We ramped up our game because we thought, “Well, now what are the kids going to do? If they’re going home from school on Friday with a bag of food normally, but they’re not going to school now, how are they going to get food?” And then there was a whole situation of less touch of every object and all of that. So we put our heads down and got to work, and we developed a new program pretty much immediately with the help of our partners to make pre-packs instead of having single line items.
And really, within a month, we had pre-packs being delivered to children in different neighborhoods through bus routes, different pickup spots. Some schools had drive-through pickups. And teachers from each of the programs, we would just call and be like, “Is there anyone willing to put a mask on, go volunteer to just hand these out?” We had masks that we donated to these programs and gloves that people had donated to us, too, so we could keep it all sterilized and everything.
So that was a turning point as well for our organization because even though we were… I promise you, I was probably working 60 hours a week. All of us at Blessings were working really hard because we wanted to make sure these kids were getting their food, but it was great to be able to still feed the kids. That’s the number one ultimate goal.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
I want to ask you, again, from the national perspective, you’re the Director of Athletic Partnerships, and there is a long list of partnerships nationwide, probably some very familiar names. Talk about the partnerships that you have, athletic or non-athletic, nationally.
Beth Bush, Blessings in a Backpack:
Well, I’m going to talk athletic because that’s my baby. We have had a great relationship with professional athletes and leagues nationwide since day one, and we’ve been really lucky. And this is almost 15 years ago, and I have to say it all started with the PGA TOUR Wives Association as a group, and then individual members such as Tabitha Furyk, that really kind of started us down the road of athletic partnerships.
Tabitha and Jim have literally done everything from being founding member of our First Coast Blessings Board to packing thousands of backpacks over the years to being one of our largest donors who have been the leaders in program growth for not only this area but inspired others to get involved nationwide. Along with the Furyks, the PGA Tour has been so supportive of us. Nationwide, we’ve got all kinds of different golfers. Actually, the Central Florida (chapter) is the Justin and Kate Rose Foundation chapter, so they’ve been huge supporters.
She also was with Tabitha on a founding board. Outside of golf, we’ve got Dale Earnhardt Jr., who is one of our longest-standing partners. He’s an incredible partner. He and his family and foundation support schools in the North Carolina area, but they’ve also done many grants through different social media campaigns, and we’ve been allowed to give this funding to schools across the nation. We’ll have our volunteer coordinators write in for these mini-grants, and Dale Jr.’s team provide us that. So that was amazing. NFL Foundation has backed their players.
They’ll do matching grants if a player is involved. So Randall Cobb, who actually went to Kentucky and played there. He was with Green Bay; now he’s with the Jets. He’s been a really long-time partner. Derrick Henry has been a partner, most recently with the Titans. And we’ve got a Baltimore player, Kyle Hamilton, who’s involved. We’ve got NBA Cares. We’ve got Major League Baseball nationwide, longstanding partnership with the Chicago Cubs and just literally could go on for a long time to discuss our sports philanthropy and social impact that has been Blessings main awareness vehicle over the years.
I would like to say about that, the athletes, they’re a very great group of people to associate with because they have put the time, the effort, and the energy into doing what they love. They’re very committed. A lot of them grew up poor and a lot of them know what it feels like to go home on Friday and not have anything to eat. A lot of them have been in Boys and Girls Club. They’ve grown up in the community centers, so they’re awesome. I can say I don’t have any athletes that have been a one and done donation.
They stay on. Most of them have been on for… They come on board, and they stay on board because they just understand the need.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Peggy, give me some background on how Nemours and Blessings in a Backpack came together in partnership.
Peggy Parish, Nemours Children’s Health:
Sure. Well, Nemours Cares Week…it started as an annual week where the entire enterprise got together and created volunteer opportunities for all of our associates to get back to the community. One of the opportunities we had for our associates to volunteer was to stuff backpacks with Blessings in a Backpack. So that started about four years ago, right here in Jacksonville. It was so popular that we ended up doing it again that year, and then we extended it to central Florida. So now our partnership with Blessings in a Backpack is here in Northeast Florida and Central Florida.
We have been incredibly impressed with the way Blessings in a Backpack runs their organization to serve the children in need in our community. So we knew from day one this was an organization that we trusted and that we wanted to strengthen that partnership. So now, fast-forward four years, our partnership has resulted in creating over 64,000 bags of food for these children, serving over 300,000 meals. And that, to me, is what Well Beyond Medicine is all about.
It’s leaving our clinic, leaving our hospital, and going to the community to serve children that would never have an opportunity to come here to our campus to see our clinicians.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
And I understand that another milestone has been hit recently and that there’s…
Peggy Parish, Nemours Children’s Health:Yes.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Especially here in Jacksonville. You tell me, I’m not going to spoil the surprise.
Beth Bush, Blessings in a Backpack:
This is hers to share.
Peggy Parish, Nemours Children’s Health:
We are really… Like I mentioned, we have been so incredibly impressed with the work and the impact Blessings offers to children throughout the country. Earlier this year, I was talking to a representative from Blessings in a Backpack and learned that they had a waiting list. I mean, they serve thousands of children here in Florida, but there are so many more kids in need that could really use this food.
So we here at Nemours Children’s Health learned that 880 kids have been identified here in Jacksonville needing food that was not able to receive the food. And we wanted to do something about that. So, we decided to eliminate that entire waiting list. So now all of those kids, 880 kids will have food every single weekend for the entire school year.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Beth, what kind of impact does that have on the work done here in Jacksonville specifically?
Beth Bush, Blessings in a Backpack:
Well, it’s just been an awesome relationship with Nemours Children’s Health. I’ve been with Blessings in a Backpack since day one. So we love somebody that’s going to come in and say, “We’re going to support one child.” But to have an opportunity to partner with Nemours on 880 children and with the Furyk Foundation on board, I can’t say enough about it, how important it’s to our organization. It’s going to move the needle, not just here in Jacksonville.
It’s going to spread awareness. Well, it’s definitely spreading awareness nationwide. That will increase our visibility. It will increase the kid count of who we can feed. It will increase everything, all opportunities for everyone involved. So it means everything to us.
Peggy Parish, Nemours Children’s Health:
And you mentioned Jim and Tabitha Furyk. They are such incredible community leaders here in Jacksonville and beyond, to be honest with you. I was talking to Tabitha Furyk a couple of months ago, and I told her this is something that we are considering to eliminate the waiting list. And I asked if the Jim and Tabitha Furyk Foundation wanted to help, and without hesitation, she smiled, and she said, “Yes, yes, we do.” So it’s actually Nemours Children’s Health and the Jim and Tabitha Furyk Foundation together has eliminated this waiting list.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
That is absolutely amazing. I want to ask; you said this started four years ago, which would put it back around 2019, and a lot happened in between, say for example, COVID-19. How did that impact the work that you did?
Peggy Parish, Nemours Children’s Health:
Well, when we did our first volunteer event, we hosted it here in the clinic. We know our associates are so busy that it’s hard for them to go out on their nights and weekends to give back. Although our associates are lovely and they love doing it, they have other responsibilities as well. So in order to make it successful and easy for our associates, we brought it here. During COVID, that’s when we started doing it twice a year. We knew that the community still needed us more probably during the pandemic than ever before.
So, we really got creative and thought about the best ways to make that impact in the community. So that’s when we started hosting this event twice a year, and we slowly started to increase the numbers of bags that we were able to fill. Because since day one, our associates look forward to coming into our conference room, our auditorium upstairs, and filling the backpacks. If they had five minutes to spare or an hour, it didn’t matter. They were making a difference with their time.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Beth, do you have any stories…personal stories of kids that you know who have been served by the program and who’ve really appreciated just going home on a weekend with food?
Beth Bush, Blessings in a Backpack:
I have my first story; it’s my why. I was volunteering and went to the first school that we started in Louisville, Kentucky, and just was standing there handing out. I was in charge of the applesauce. I was handing the kids their applesauce, and this little girl wouldn’t take her applesauce. And I said, “Well, just take it home to your mom.” And she said, “Oh, I don’t have a mom.” And I was like, “Okay, well, take it home to your siblings.” And she’s like, “Oh, I don’t have any siblings.” And coming from my background, I was totally naive in asking questions I should not have been asking, obviously.
But it’s the first time I’d volunteered at something like this. And I looked down at her, and I said, “Well, who takes care of you?” And she looked up at me and smiled and she goes, “Well, you do silly.” And I found out later that day that she came, she was part of the orphanage that gets bused to the school that takes home a bag of food every Friday. And that this little girl loved taking it to her home at the orphanage every Friday. She loved it. And there were probably a handful of kids that were bused every day. And I learned to not ask those type of questions anymore. And she was the happiest thing you’ve ever seen. I just think that’s a great story to show you that she’s a resilient child. She was happy as could be, and she just didn’t want her applesauce, but I was making her take it.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Beth Bush is the Director of Athletic and Strategic Partnerships for Blessings in a Backpack. She was joined in conversation by Peggy Parish, Director of Community Relations for Nemours Children’s Health Florida. Dr. Peggy Greco is a clinical psychologist who currently serves as Assistant Vice President and Chief Patient Experience Officer for Nemours Children’s Health.
Our roving podcast reporter, Cheryl Mann, spoke with Dr. Greco about the three most important influences on a child’s mental and emotional health. Here’s what Dr. Greco had to say.
Dr. Peggy Greco, Nemours Children’s Health:
That’s definitely the question of the day. I think we’re all aware of the increasing incidents of depression and suicidality in older kids and teens. And I think there tends to be a focus on social media. And when you think about the fact that when you look at the graphs that overlay both use of social media, implementation of the iPhone, and incidents of depression, you see the corresponding inclines. The temptation is to, I think, really put all of our nickels in one pot and say, this is what we need to focus on.
But it’s obviously much broader than that. So I think the three biggest influences are, one, basic needs. So, when you think about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, do kids have the food that they need? Do they have shelter? Are they being basically sleeping at regular intervals and getting the sleep that they need? The second is safety. Emotional and psychological safety is necessary for growing up in a way that you have really robust emotional health. And the third influence, and this is again another broad one, are really caregivers.
And that’s broader than just parents because it includes teachers (and) other adults that are in the child’s environment that are important to them, that have that influence. When you think about those three broad areas, I think it’s interesting to think about the intersection of those with social media. So, we tend to think of social media use only from the child’s perspective in terms of the time spent on it. We don’t think about the impact of parent time on it.
So I think one of the things we can think about are how are our kids growing up differently than they were before the advent of all of these tools, which can also be very useful. And I think one of the most striking differences that is visible to almost anyone who’s in a public location or has their own kids or friends that have kids is that you rarely see someone without an electronic device. And part of building emotional health is learning how to tolerate and cope with emotions.
And instead, the reaction tends to be, “I don’t have to experience this boredom, this disinterest, this irritation. I can escape.” So, even babies. I was in a DMV a while back helping my dad, and there was lots of crying babies there. Almost all of them had an electronic device. I didn’t see any books. No manipulatives. None of the toys that we know really stimulate child development.
And so I think that’s something we have to give some thought to in terms of how are we teaching our children to experience emotions, to tolerate them and cope with them. They’re not learning the fact that they can be competent in their own ability to be able to deal with those emotions. Instead, there’s this tendency to escape, and that’s reinforced.
Cheryl Munn, Nemours Children’s Health:
If you had a magic wand and you could just say, “Let me take this away.” What would you do to improve children’s health?
Dr. Peggy Greco, Nemours Children’s Health:
Taking away is always a lot harder than adding. So, I think to be truly successful, I would instead add layer back-ins. Social media is here to stay, and there are some obvious benefits, and it’s not really social media that’s the sole cause. It’s really how we’re using it and our overreliance on it. So, I would layer in very purposeful education around coping with emotions.
So whether that involves pediatricians who are helping parents understand what their kids need emotionally from a very early age, whether it’s a school-based curriculum that focuses on emotions and how to cope, but that were very purposeful as a society in terms of building tolerance to emotion and ability to cope.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Dr. Peggy Greco is Assistant Vice President and Chief Patient Experience Officer for Nemours Children’s Health.
Music:
Well Beyond Medicine.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Many thanks to today’s guests, Beth Bush, Peggy Parish, and Dr. Peggy Greco, for sharing their expertise and insights. And thank you for listening. So, what do you think are the top three most important influences on a child’s mental, physical, and emotional health? Leave a voicemail with your thoughts at nemourswellbeyond.org. That’s nemourswellbeyond.org, where you’ll also find all of our previous podcast episodes. You can subscribe to the podcast and leave a review.
Our production team this week includes Che Parker, Susan Masucci and Cheryl Munn. Join us next time as we talk about childhood obesity and learn how one California hospital is working to achieve well beyond medicine in their community. I’m Carol Vassar. Until next time, remember, we can change children’s health for good well beyond medicine.
