The family Thanksgiving party will be at Aurea Garcia’s house this year.
She’s planning to help feed 12 kids and eight grown-ups, she said. Garcia and a group of mothers of students at the Fruit Valley Community Learning Center stopped by the Vancouver elementary school Tuesday to grab a Thanksgiving food bag. Dozens of families in need filed in and out of a side room at the school to receive gift bags of Thanksgiving meal ingredients.
“We all feel very blessed,” Garcia said.
Staci Boehlke, the school’s family-community resource coordinator, “just does a remarkable job of gathering the community together, and the volunteers, the people who donate everything,” Garcia said. “It helps a lot of families.”
Family-community resource coordinators are staff members who help connect needy students and families with basic needs to help keep kids and families engaged with school.
Volunteers with the Vancouver Police Activities League — which organized the food drive — and other organizations assembled and distributed about 80 of the gift bags at the school Tuesday.
When it comes to events like Tuesday’s, Boehlke said she enjoys that she gets to sit back and watch people help each other.
“We’re doing 79 families. If I had to find food for 79 families — there’s no way,” she said.
But for Tuesday’s gift bag event, community organizations were calling her and asking how they could help, she said.
The Police Activities League put together about 50 food bags, split between families at Fruit Valley, Martin Luther King and Harney elementary schools, Police Activities League Executive Director Jenny Thompson said.
The organization works with the schools to identify families who could use some help for the holiday, Thompson said. The league is a nonprofit that works with law enforcement to organize charitable events or learning and recreational programs for local children.
It has been doing the holiday gift basket drive for four years, and this is the first time they’ve been able to expand to other schools, Thompson said.
“We supplement what’s already happening in the schools,” she said. “The ones that the schools are getting, it’s not enough, but it provides a little bit of a dent.”
The gift bags included a turkey, some potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pies or makings for a pie and other fixings.
“For one thing, I feel like much of my job is getting to be in the front row and watching other people do stuff,” Boehlke said. “It’s a good job to have when you just get to see community take place in front of you.”
The Port of Vancouver helped provide a few turkeys, she said. The Police Activities League also partnered with Wal-Mart, the Vancouver Metro Sunset Rotary, Jennifer Venable of John L. Scott Real Estate and the police department to help assemble the baskets.
According to the state, almost 85 percent of the students at Fruit Valley last school year were eligible for free or reduced-price meals.
Food insecurity and access to grocery stores are recurring problems for the families she works with, Boehlke said.
“Families have gotten pretty good at making food stretch and being creative,” she said, but many of the adults in these families are working two or three jobs and still struggling to make it. Add in the housing crisis and rising rents, she said, and it only gets harder.
“When your rent goes up three- or four-hundred dollars a month, it comes out of food and gas,” she said.
Tiffany Stewart has gotten turkeys through the program for the past six years. When you’re low-income, she said, the price of a turkey at the grocery store is just too much, and it’s painful, as a mother, to not be able to provide the best Thanksgiving you can.
“Every year, when we think we’re not going to need it, we’re like, ‘Yeah! We’re not going to need it this year!’ And then, every year, we’re like, ‘What do you think?'” she said. “Without (Boehlke), I wouldn’t have a turkey.”
Stewart will smoke her turkey for this year’s meal, she said.
