Cougar Cupboard

On Tuesday – February 1 – the steering committee of the CougarCupboard decided to investigate soliciting donations from the public and businesses to sustain and expand the mission of the CougarCupboard. If you are interested in helping – please see the Needs List.

We were so blessed to meet with the Elementary Director at Rockpointe Church. She is working with us to make sure our needs are met, and she will be focused on helping us find sponsors for our weeks that have not yet been claimed. She also gave us a wonderful menu that she uses at other campuses for a two-week break (such as the one quickly approaching). We didn’t know if we would be able to make that happen; then we met with Christ Episcopal Church of Cedar Park. The church not only took on the second week of each month, but agreed to take on half of our students for the two-week holiday menu plan! We decided to contact all of the staff at our school to try and cover the other half, and I am happy to report that within 2 hours those needs were completely fulfilled by our RBMS family! Now each participant in Cougar Cupboard will be receiving enough food to sustain them during our two week break.

We started sending home food last Friday, thanks to the wonderful people at Sri Shirdi Sai Baba Temple, who agreed to support us the first week of every month. They brought us every single item on our wish list, with a few additional items thrown in to make it more nutritional. The students were so excited when they came to pick up their backpacks! One of the students could not even function at his after-school practice because he told his sponsor “There’s a WHOLE block of Velveeta in there-do you KNOW how much that costs?”! The students literally were smiling “ear-to-ear”.

The Cougar Cupboard’s BackPack Program brings a simple solution to a basic need that is not adequately met for many local children — food.  Running Brushy Middle School staff identify students who are food insecure and provide them with kid-friendly food that is distributed discreetly at school at the end of each week. Through the Cougar Cupboard BackPack Program, we hope that weekends without adequate nourishment are no longer an issue for children in households where sufficient and consistent food supplies fall short of what is needed.