In its first week, the web site and the sharing of the needs of needy children and families in Lebanon on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, have raised 10 coats, $61 to pay for a volunteer's fingerprinting, pots and pans and two twin mattresses for needy people in the community.
Other programs are set up in the Columbus area, Alabama and the Sycamore school district, north of Cincinnati.
“I created Neighborhood Bridges as way to address runaway poverty in suburban America,” said Rick Bannister, a former school board member in Westerville and founder and CEO of the non-profit.
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The program expanded into Alabama in 2019 after Bannister’s brother, David, suggested it to leaders of Hoover, Alabama, where he lives. There are now 14 Alabama communities with a Gateway to Kindness.
“We basically want to address the health and wellness of the students, fill basic needs they might have,” Bannister said. “It’s meant to serve the individual needs of each community.”
While poverty may be most often associated with urban areas, Bannister pointed to the fact that about one-third of the students in Westerville, a middle-to-upper-middle-class Columbus suburb, qualified for the free lunches as an example of growing suburban poverty problems.
“This is not meant to replicate existing services, this is meant to bridge all resources together,” he said.
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Tracy Funke, the district resource coordinator who started the movement to bring the program to Lebanon, said about one-quarter of the Lebanon district’s 5,500 students qualify for the free-lunch program.
“It’s really a community initiative. It’s easiest to roll it out through the schools,” Funke said.
Upon coming to work for the Lebanon school district three years ago, Funke, a licensed social worker, presented six sessions on “Hidden Lebanon” with a children’s services worker, police detective and representative from “mobile crisis,” in which a social worker rides along with police on calls involving drugs or other problems.
Funke, a licensed social worker and former mobile crisis worker, said filling the needs of the district’s needy students and families “was a little overwhelming” on her own.
Funke said she took the Neighborhood Bridges program, she first learned of through a district consultant, to district administrators in late 2019.
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“Within 5 days we were meeting with Rick Bannister,” she said.
After seeking input at a community meeting, a steering committee was formed. Lebanon Bridges was launched on Feb. 7.
“What a great response we’ve gotten,” Funke said. “The key to this getting the word out.”
The Lebanon YMCA and schools in the district are local donation centers. The children and families served remain anonymous.
The nonprofit is supported by corporate sponsorship and grants, Bannister said. “One hundred percent of what’s donated in a community stays in that community,” he said.
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