Believe me, we have stood before the City Council, met with the Deputy Director of the City, sat with the Homeless Director and argued the need for funding for this program to no avail. While we worked on getting a $50,000 grant to be able to address this dire need, at the last moment it fell through and the City did not come up with what we thought we would obtain. Attempts to get funding from foundations have fallen on deaf ears and there appears to be other causes that were considered more important than feeding homeless children who have no access to food over the weekend. We met with One Baltimore, written letters to our elected officials and attempted to meet with the State's Department on Homeless issues and the individual who was supposed to meet with us didn't show up for the meeting and didn't have the courtesy to even contact us back and advise us why. There has been no lack of due diligence on our part in our attempts to collect additional funding for this project and we have over the last five years managed to obtain excess of $100,000 by ourselves to fight this condition in the city. In a City that can approve creating a tribute to "DIVINE", argue about spending, I believe $43,000,000 on McKeldon park, giving millions of dollars in TIF's to developers, feeding thousands of children who are homeless appears to be a difficult task to accomplish. If we were successful in accomplishing our goal, we could feed all of the current homeless at an annual cost of $2,700,000, which is nothing in the savings it would mean to the City 10/20 years in the future.
With this in mind, we believe that it is now up to us and our community religious organizations and clubs to pick up where we have not achieved our goals. Therefore, we have created an idea that has been used in other issues and that is "Adopt-a-School". Of all of the schools in the City there are many churches and groups that meet in areas where there is a school and most schools, if not all, have a homeless population. These churches and clubs can simply find out the number of homeless students within the individual schools and make arrangements to adopt them and the homeless population for one school year. You have to remember if you follow this, that you have to continue the program throughout the school year and it can involve 1 child through any number of children. We have a formula on what is needed to be given in each backpack and it follows U.S.D.A. guidelines for good nutrition and needed calories. We can assist you in meeting with the schools and presenting the program to the Principal of the particular school and we can answer all and any of your questions about the program. We will be at the "B'more Healthy Expo" at the Convention on March 19, 2016, which is free to all people who attend and we are listed under "Heart's Place Services, Inc." and ready to assist you as much as we can. FOX was kind enough in assisting us in getting us a booth at the convention and please drop by and say hello and learn more about our program. If you bring your children, let them write a letter to one of the children who are involved in our program so that they can be delivered to all of the schools that we handle.
Under our "Adopt-a-School" idea we need to feed 2600 children and their families in this city of ours and we can do it, if we work one school at a time.
