Will Dance for Kids: Utah Food Bank Fundraiser
(KUTV) Will Dance for Kids visited the 2News Studio.
Saturday, March 5th, at approximately 8:30pm, at Taylorsville High School, over 1300 local dancers from 20 dance studios will present a check for $50,000 to Ginette Bott with The Utah Food Bank! The money donated goes directly to the Kid's Cafe and Backpack programs at the Utah Food Bank. This project is kids helping kids so it is a wonderful day of dancers sharing their time and talent to help kids who are not as fortunate.
Dancers have raised this amount through Sponsors, In-kind donations prize drawing tickets. The project is kids helping kids and instills the spirit of giving and sharing in every dancer who participates.
Will Dance for Kids Project is both a dance competition and fundraising competition. The Grand Prize is awarded to the studio with the most donations through fundraising efforts. Individual fundraisers from the studios will win prizes donated by the national dance community. Fund raising efforts kicked off with a Dance Battle in October, with hundreds of dancers collecting hundreds of jars of peanut butter to donate to the Kids Programs.
The statistics on Childhood hunger are staggering. One in five Utah kids don't know where their next meal is coming from. Last year 63,630 backpacks of food were sent home to feed hungry kids and 282,803 after school meals were served in the Kid's Cafe program. We are dancing to make a difference in the lives of hungry kids.
Approximately 423,000 Utahns, and 1 in 5 Utah children, are at risk of missing a meal today. This equates to 15% of our population.
Through generous donations of food time and money last year, we were able to distribute more than 37 million pounds of food, the equivalent of over 31 million meals, to Utahns facing hunger statewide.
Kids Cafe: this program prepares and distributes up to 1,800 nutritious meals daily to children who may not get dinner that evening at more than 42 after-school sites. Last year, we provided almost 283,000 Kids Cafe meals for at-risk kids.
BackPack Program: when kids are out of school for the weekend, they miss school meal programs, and many don't have food at home to get them through the weekend. This program distributes backpacks full of easy-to-open and kid-friendly food each Friday during the school year to help get them through the weekend. On Mondays they bring back the empty backpack, and school staff refill it and hold onto it until the following Friday, and it happens each week. Last year we distributed more than 63,000 backpacks to children to ensure hunger-free weekends.
Utah Food Bank can stretch each $1 donated into $7.35 worth of goods and services, so donations of money have the most impact, but donated food allows us to provide the variety our clients appreciate greatly.
