Elks enlist in Backback Club

MANATEE COUNTY — Light filtered through the windows of a portable behind Freedom Elementary School as a team of volunteers sorted packages of jerky, cheese and crackers and other items and placed them into plastic bags.

Once finished, members of the Lakewood Ranch-Sarasota Elks placed the items in backpacks to be sent home with children who otherwise may not have enough to eat.

“I think it’s wonderful,” Lodge member and volunteer Mary Bilkie said as she worked. “I like helping families that are in need and in our county.

“We’ve gathered things and taken them to Bay Pines (veterans hospital in St. Petersburg), but this is more local,” she said. “This is wonderful. Children — that’s what we really delight in.”

This year, the Lakewood Ranch-Sarasota Elks have committed every third Friday of the month to support Freedom’s Backpack Club, a non-profit organization that provides children in need with backpacks filled with food. The lodge on Jan. 27 also kicked off an ongoing food drive to support the program.

“We want to do as much as we can locally,” the lodge’s Exalted Ruler Rick Thorson said.

East County resident Sherri Covey, who has coordinated Backpack Club efforts at Freedom with the help of guidance counselor Sherri Brunner, said the Elks’ timing is perfect.

Covey, who continues to help with the program her daughter, Stephanie, started in August 2008, struggled last year to keep it going after a local Publix Supermarket was no longer able to donate non-perishable food items on a regular basis and the majority of her longstanding volunteer team from Braden River High School had graduated.

“It’s just such a blessing (the Elks) have been willing to step forward,” Sherri Covey said. “It’s wonderful to have help.

“There have been so many children who have benefited from this,” she said. “They’ve seen their grades improve and attendance.”

Freedom Principal Jim Mennes said hist students enjoy participating in the program.

“It’s so much more than food,” he said, noting the majority of the Freedom students served in Backpack Club live in Manatee Trailer Park, where school staff members hosted their first Party in the Park for families in December. “If we didn’t do it, I don’t know how they’d get those items.”

For more about the club, visit www.backpackclubinc.org.

Contact Pam Eubanks at [email protected].

ORIGIN
Backpack Club founder Stephanie Covey, now a student at the University of Florida, this year has been named a 2011 Volunteer of the Year for the Alachua County School Volunteer Program for her work at the A. Quinn Jones Center.

RAISING AWARENESS
The Lakewood Ranch-Sarasota Elks Lodge will bring its Drug Awareness trailer to the Lakewood Ranch Main Street’s Music on Main event March 4 as well as the Farmer’s Market March 5. The program intends to educate parents about drugs and the warning signs associated with drug use.