Weekend Nutrition Program
Project: Weekend food bags for Quilcene and Brinnon students
Request: $12,500
The Weekend Nutrition Program exists to alleviate the food worry that underprivileged students in Quilcene and Brinnon may carry when they leave school on Friday.
It is a simple program, deliberately so. Volunteers buy food in bulk at membership stores and grocery outlets. Volunteers assemble it into individual bags. Volunteers deliver those bags to both the Quilcene and Brinnon schools, where school staff discreetly distribute them on Friday.
Each bag contains items for two breakfasts, two lunches, two dinners and four snacks. A jar of peanut butter is provided each month.
Food for any student who needs it
WNP is available every week of school and open to every student at Quilcene and Brinnon schools — approximately 300 children in total. There is no qualification requirement and no proof of income. Signing up is done with an easy form available at each school office.
That design choice matters more than it might appear. Means-testing a program creates paperwork barriers, and paperwork barriers exclude exactly the families most under pressure. It also marks children. WNP chose neither.
The scale: nearly 1,000 bags went to the two schools during the 2024–25 school year, and the program expects that number to persist or increase.
Two schools carrying a lot
Quilcene and Brinnon are rural towns whose small schools face significant vulnerabilities — chronic funding shortfalls, teacher shortages and geographic isolation.
As of 2024–25, the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction rates both schools as high poverty: Quilcene at 64%, Brinnon at 70%.
Many children from low-income families rely heavily on free or reduced-price school breakfast and lunch. Those programs close when the week ends. WNP was formed by concerned citizens in Quilcene and Brinnon who wanted to make sure no children go hungry on non-school days.
Here are the problems you can help solve
The challenges WNP faces are easy to understand: increasing food costs in a rural area continue to be the main challenge. There's no dramatic story of a lost grant here, just the steady math of the same bags of food costing more each year with more demand.
UGN/Give Jefferson provides 80% of the Weekend Nutrition Program's annual revenue. While the program also receives direct donations from community members and gifts from local nonprofits including the Quilcene Brinnon Garden Club and the Emerald Towns Alliance the overwhelming majority of what it has to spend comes from your gifts as a part of this campaign.
Which means your gift here is not a contribution toward a program. It is, in large part, the program. If this funding softens, the bags get smaller or fewer, immediately, in two of the highest-poverty schools in the county.
What your donation makes possible
All funds are used to buy food. The program has almost no other expenses; no staff, no facility, no overhead worth mentioning. Volunteers do the purchasing, the packing and the delivery.
$12,500 keeps roughly 1,000 bags going out across the school year to children in Quilcene and Brinnon whose families are stretched thin. Your money buys groceries, and a child eats on Saturday and Sunday.
