Boys and Girls Club provides over 1,000 kids with meals

Last month the Boys and Girls Club of the Flathead Reservation shut its doors on the club’s usual after-school programming due to COVID-19 closures. Now the building lacks the common chatter coming from the children who participated in the activities, but the program has not stopped serving the kids.

The club altered its normal operations to begin providing a massive evening meal distribution program that is now serving every community on the Flathead Reservation. The Boys and Girls Club sends out over 1,000 brown-bag dinners a night, and has a mission to continue providing for the kids as many need even more support during this time.

Just before local schools were closed amid the coronavirus pandemic, the Boys and Girls Club of the Flathead Reservation executive director Aric Cooksley was working with his team to begin forming a plan. Although at that point the club was still open, he felt like a closure was inevitably in the future and wanted to be prepared to serve the kids in whatever way possible.

“We had been exploring what we could do as far as food because we realized that even if the schools were providing breakfast and lunch, there was an awful lot (of kids) that wouldn’t have good dinner options,” Cooksley explained.

The group began slowly, serving just over 100 meals a night to youth in the area who could pick up the meals at the club. But Cooksley said that in the first week several churches contacted him wanting to help the club expand their outreach to more communities in need. With the assistance of several volunteers, in a week they had doubled the meals they were handing out each night and continued to expand the meal program with each day that passed.

The Boys and Girls Club, with the help of several volunteers, now have evening meal pickup points all over the county and even do some door-to-door delivery depending on a kid’s situation. The staff continually tracks the needs in each community and adjusts the number of meals sent out every night.

The meals are made in a large commercial kitchen housed in the Ronan club building. Each dinner is balanced, coming with an entree, fruit, vegetable, grain and milk.

The club has had assistance from numerous churches, foundations and community individuals volunteering. Also community development corporations assisted the club in various ways and the school districts helped with some food procurement.

“We have volunteers coming in every day to help make it all possible because without them there’s no way we’d be able to do this,” Cooksley said.

In addition, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes alongside the Salish Kootenai College provided 50-plus large coolers for transporting the meals to pick-up sites. With all of this support and the ability to expand the feeding program to such depths, Cooksley said all of the staff at the Boys and Girls Club is still employed with a normal amount of hours. He is amazed by the public’s effort and the club is reaching more kids than it ever imagined.

“It really has been a tremendous community (achievement),” Cooksley said. “A testament to when a community gets involved to make things happen, an awful lot gets done and stuff that may have seemed impossible before becomes possible.”

Although serving evening meals is not foreign to the staff at the club, they usually provide a meal and a snack with their after school program, the staff had to change their approach from a normal cafeteria style meal to a grab-and-go meal. And the club is only used to preparing food for 100 kids or less.

In order to accomplish this, Cooksley said many of his staff members are performing tasks well outside their regular job description and thinking outside the box.

“It has been phenomenal to see, our staff has just been incredible at adjusting and adapting,” Cooksley said. “Most of them were not hired to make meals… and they have stepped up in tremendous ways to just meet the need and take care of kids.”

The length of the Boys and Girls Club closure is unknown at this time and because of that Cooksley said there is a lot of uncertainty surrounding funding and meal vouchers. But he expressed regardless of circumstances, the club will continue serving youth in the community in whatever way possible.

Reporter Whitney England may be reached at 758-4419 or wengland@leaderadvertiser.com