RHINELANDER – The Rhinelander Area Food Pantry (RAFP) is taking its popular summer food program on the road this year, expanding from one site to three as it looks to feed more children across the region during the months when school meals are unavailable.
Executive Director Courtney Smith said the organization will operate its familiar Hodag Food Wagon in Rhinelander while adding two new sites: a closed-enrollment program for youth involved with Kinship of Tomahawk, and a new “Hornet Food Truck” stationed at the Elcho Area Community Food Pantry on Thursdays.
All three sites will run from July 9 through Aug. 27.
“We’re just looking at ways to fill that gap in the summer when we know kids don’t have access to school breakfast and lunch,” Smith said.
Last summer, the pantry distributed 12,760 meals to children and teens over eight weeks at its single Rhinelander location. With three sites and expanded meal bags – now containing seven breakfasts and seven lunches each, up from five of each last year – Smith said the program is projecting more than 30,000 meals over the same eight-week stretch this summer.
The Kinship of Tomahawk site is a closed program, available only to children and teens enrolled in Kinship of Tomahawk programming. Smith described it as a starting point for building a broader relationship with the Tomahawk community.
“We really wanted to identify what’s the most at-risk group in Tomahawk that we could partner with and what was the easiest way to make the largest impact,” Smith said.
The pantry hopes to serve approximately 75 additional kids through that partnership.
“We are very excited to partner with RAFP and be able to offer this program to our KinsKids,” said KinsKlub Coordinator Kris Berg. “Knowing the kids will have healthy, kid-friendly meals for July and August takes a lot of pressure off of our families. Growing kids that are fed are happier and healthier kids. This keeps them on track to enter the next school year with brains that are fueled and ready to learn.”
The Elcho site, dubbed the Hornet Food Truck in a nod to the local school mascot, will operate at the Elcho Area Community Food Pantry on Thursdays from 3 to 4 p.m. The site is open to any child or teen in the community, with no income eligibility or registration requirements.
Smith said the area has been without summer food service for children for the past two years.
“Food security is definitely a food pantry issue,” Smith said, “and we can leverage this contract. If it’s outside the box, so be it.”
The program is funded through a contract with the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s Summer Food Service Program, which reimburses the pantry for food, labor and operational costs.
Smith was emphatic that the expansion does not draw on donations made to the RAFP’s general fund, nor does it divert resources from existing local services.
“At no point are we ever taking services away from another community to give them to another,” she said. “It’s literally being able to add on a whole other layer.”
Smith said the Rhinelander site’s experience last summer illustrated how the program can do more than simply distribute food. When the Hodag Food Wagon set up at the Rhinelander food pantry last year, 23 households with children signed up for pantry services for the first time during the eight-week run.
“It’s a huge reducer of stigma,” Smith said. “It increases access, normalizes this stuff – the food pantry just becomes less of an oddity.”
She hopes the Elcho partnership produces a similar effect for that community.
The Rhinelander Hodag Food Wagon will continue operating from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. on its regular schedule.
The Hornet Food Truck will be at the Elcho Area Community Food Pantry from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. on Thursdays, and the Tomahawk site will run at 5 p.m. for enrolled Kinship participants.
All sites operate July 9 through Aug. 27.
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