When the holidays roll around, Baldwin County shows up. From food drives to toy collections, the schools and community partners work side by side to ensure every family feels supported during the season of giving.
This year, Communities In Schools of Milledgeville-Baldwin County (SMBC) is adding a brand-new twist to traditional food donations.
SMBC Director for Communities Courtney Bentley spends the holiday season focused on one big goal: connecting families with the resources they need, whether that’s food on the table or gifts under the tree.
CIS has a presence in every Baldwin County public school from kindergarten through 12th grade. Site coordinators are on campus each day, building relationships with students and families and serving as a bridge to community support.
As those site coordinators shared what families were facing, one recurring challenge kept coming up, “Many times we see that we can’t really piece those items together to make a full, hearty meal,” Bentley explained.
So, Bentley searched for a solution. While scrolling through TikTok, Bentley came across a creator in another community doing something different with food donations by assembling “meal kits” inspired by services like HelloFresh and Blue Apron.
Using Neighborhood Leaders Grant funding, she downloaded the recipe cards from the creator’s link tree and went shopping, carefully choosing shelf-stable ingredients that families could easily store, cook, and enjoy.
The result were “ingredient bags” that function like a Blue Apron or HelloFresh box, but are built entirely from non-perishable items donated and assembled in the Baldwin community.
One of her favorite examples is a White Chicken Chili kit. The bag includes canned chicken, beans, salsa, and other pantry staples that come together into a warm, filling meal. The recipe card also lists a few optional extras like certain seasonings or cheese, but those are not required for the dish to work.
Families can also hold onto the recipe cards and recreate the meals later for around $10 or less, stretching the impact of a single ingredient bag beyond one holiday season.
For the first round of ingredient bags, Communities in Schools assembled and distributed approximately 120 bags to families in the Oconee Heights area, served by New Beginnings Church, a long-standing partner of CIS.
CIS will be partnering with additional local food pantries over the coming weeks and months to get ingredient bags into the hands of more families across Baldwin County. Thanks to an additional $5,000 award from CIS of Georgia, Communities in Schools expects to provide roughly 750 ingredient bags throughout the community turning a creative idea into a large-scale support system for local families.
At its heart, this project isn’t just about food but about dignity, time, and togetherness.
• Insteadofarandomassortmentof cans, families receive a clear plan for dinner.
• Insteadofwonderinghowtostretcha pantry, they get a ready-made recipe and all the essentials in one place.
• Insteadoffacingtheholidayswith uncertainty, they gain one more night where dinner is taken care of and maybe even a chance to cook together, learn together, and sit down at the table as a family. Bentley stated she will measure success through feedback from the food pantries who directly serve families, listening to what works and what can grow next.
— Contributed