Teaching Generosity with Odwalla and Champions for Kids Campaign

I am thrilled to be able to team up with Odwalla to help campaign as Champions for Kids in trying to fight childhood hunger in America. This week we are learning about generosity at Meaningful Mama. For more activities on generosity, make sure to look under the “generosity” tab under character development. Part of learning to be generous is inspiring others to be generous, and hopefully you will see that “pay it forward” experience in today’s service project. Odwalla contacted me wanting to donate some of their Odwalla Kid Bars to our local food bank. There’s the beginning of the chain reaction. We, of course, accepted the offer. That inspired us to donate more food from our own resources. I then wanted to inspire neighbors while making them aware of our church food bank in case they were in need of a resource to help provide for their families. We then walked around our neighborhood doing a food drive to collect more to donate to the “Bread of Life Food Bank” up the street. That action inspired our neighbors’ generosity. I was super impressed by the generous responses of some of the most humble houses on the street. Hopefully, this post inspires your generosity – especially as you become aware of the hunger needs of children.

I want to make you aware of the Champions for Kids simple service project sponsored by Odwalla. I love when companies are outward focused within their successes. Feeding people well is obviously a passion of Odwalla, and they have used that passion to make a difference in their world. This is their statement about the Hunger in Summer campaign: “When school lets out for the summer, millions of children lose access to the school breakfasts, lunches and after-school snacks they receive during the regular school year. Only 1 out of 6 children who receive free or reduced-price meals during the school year continue to receive meals during the summer months. Low-income families with children face even more challenges during the summer when they stretch their food budget to provide additional meals for their children.” In 2009, USA Today said that 20 million kids received free and reduced lunch, an all time high.  Childhood hunger is an obvious issue, and I am so happy to team with Odwalla to try and help be part of the solution. Their goal is to mobilize 20 million people by 202o to become Champions for Kids. Maybe you and your family can be part of that.

The first thing we did was head to Walmart to try and find the best prices for the Odwalla Kids Bars. I had also searched my local store online to make sure they had the product. We also went for our normal grocery run at Walmart and picked up some more food to donate to our food bank.

We were able to find the kids bars. They were actually in the produce section, so if you are looking for this product, I’d go there first. It only makes sense since they are a more natural and healthy food snack for kids.

As mentioned, Odwalla had given me the money to purchase the kid bars. Feeding kids and fighting childhood hunger is obviously a priority for this company.

The next part was up to us. I printed out information on the local food bank at our church. I wanted to make sure people were aware of Odwalla’s part in the campaign, so we doctored up our stroller. I had a cute blog post pictured with a little red wagon, but we didn’t have one of those, so I decided to make the stroller our tool for collecting donations. It worked well.

The kids loved going door to door. They especially liked ringing the door bells, which I had to explain over and over we only do once. When someone answered the door, I would tell them about the food bank. I said, “There’s a local food bank I want to make you aware of at the church up the street. Here is information if your family ever has a need. Also, today we have teamed up with Odwalla and are accepting donations for the food bank if you feel like you can contribute at this time.

We were able to collect quite a bit of food as we walked to the “Bread of Life” food bank at our church. While we know that Jesus is the “bread of life,” we also know that he commanded us to take care of the poor, sick and hungry. It was great to fill up the stroller with people in our neighborhood and a company who recognize the importance of feeding others.

Here we are arriving at the food bank with all of our goods to donate. It is so important to teach kids at a young age about generosity. Teaching cannot just happen through words but also needs to be through action. We had the opportunity to talk about childhood hunger while also talking about the generosity we experienced in the entire process of getting food to the food bank. Thank you, Odwalla, for inspiring a wonderful campaign to build awareness of the needs within our country.

Join the fight:

www.odwalla.com/

https://championsforkids.org/odwalla

Also, please visit my Google+ Shoppertunity Album.