It started with one school and four students because Laurie Borysiak had to start somewhere. She and her husband took $500 of their own money to buy food and send care packages home every Friday with those four kids at Traverse City’s East Middle School so they would have something good to eat over the weekend.

That was 2011. Tomorrow, these “Blessings in a Backpack” will leave for the weekend with some 230 students in kindergarten through eighth grade at 11 local schools – the first delivery of the school year. And Borysiak is no longer a one-woman show with a crew of volunteers.

The Father Fred Foundation is taking over the program, which has grown beyond Borysiak’s ability to run on her own. But she tells The Ticker this is just the beginning; she has hopes for reaching hundreds of more students who struggle to stay well fed when school is not in session.

Blessings in a Backpack is a national organization that the local program is now affiliated with – addressing the problem of hunger for “food insecure” children. That insecurity could come from homelessness or from an unstable situation at home, explains Deb Haase, executive director of The Father Fred Foundation.

Borysiak, who also volunteers for the Father Fred food pantry, had been utilizing a small space there to store and package the food the last couple of years as the program numbers increased. This past summer, though, she and Father Fred’s Operations Director Les Hagaman came to the Foundation’s board with a proposal to take it over – and help her grow it to meet the incredible need in the community.

“We are very excited and thankful,” says Haase, of the opportunity to take the program under its wings. Today (Thursday), Traverse City Mayor Michael Estes and Traverse City Area Public Schools (TCAPS) Superintendent Paul Soma will help package up the food at a kickoff event at 1pm celebrating the program’s new administration.

Grand Traverse Pie Co. and an anonymous donor provided seed money for Father Fred to expand the program a little bit already this school year. The national organization handles all the food ordering, which is done through a partnership with Meijer.

“We don’t pay an administrative fee to the national organization. We only pay for the food for our local program,” Haase adds.

By design, all food is single-serving portions with no preparation required – so no kitchen, or adult supervision, is needed. Every week school is in session, a team of volunteers packages the food in individual bags on Wednesdays, volunteer drivers deliver the packages to the schools on Thursdays and from there school staff discreetly places the packages in the students’ backpacks on Fridays before school lets out for the weekend.

Neither Borysiak nor anyone at Father Fred will ever know the names of the kids they are serving. Students are recommended for the program via school staff with the only requirement being eligibility for the district’s Free & Reduced Lunch program. This year, some 37 percent of TCAPS students qualify for the program.

Haase says short-term the organization would like to service all TCAPS schools and Grand Traverse County in full. Other organizations run similar weekend food programs in Leelanau, Benzie and Antrim counties.

Haase would eventually like to see Blessings in a Backpack expand into Kalkaska County, which currently is not covered by any service.

"It will take significant financial backing, but that’s our long-term goal,” she says.

Interested in lending a hand? In addition to financial donations, Borysiak says the program could always use extra hands on packing day (every Wednesday at 1pm at the Father Fred food pantry), as well as substitute drivers for food deliveries. A gift of $100 supports one child in the program for the entire school year.