Citing an ever-increasing demand for food assistance by Verde Valley families, the local nonprofit Manzanita Outreach will be shutting down its School Supplies for Teachers program at the end of the year in order to increase its capacity to serve area children. It is also looking for interested parties to take on the school supply program on a per-school basis.
The program had been in place since 2021, and its annual cost for all Verde Valley schools was about $140,000, or approximately $10,000 per school.
“In October, we distributed 4,383 food distributions to families over the course of the month,” executive director Ben Burke said. “For context, [our] beginning-of-the-year number was 3,070. So just in the course of January to October, we’ve grown by 33% in terms of food distribution, and then the poundage of food has grown slightly above that rate as well.”
The increasing demand from Manzanita Outreach’s clients, who are mostly working families, made the program’s cost no longer manageable, and Manzanita made the decision in late September to end the service. The program fills industrial-sized tool cabinets with school supplies for teachers to use and distribute as they see fit.
“We have a monthly [resupply] route we do, so the December route will be our last route,” Burke said. “But our MO Packs for Teachers program continues and is expanding, and we have launched our MO Packs for Kids program to work with the schools. We’re going to focus on food, those things are going to expand and we’ll have even more capacity there.”
“Our greatest need for school supplies happens at the beginning of each school year, so the fact that this program is ending in December does not affect us in the same way as it would have in early August,” West Sedona School Principal Elizabeth Tavasci said. “We have already had some community groups reach out about additional supplies and will also be able to use our WSS site based M&O budget to order supplies for teachers and their classrooms. Manzanita has been a great blessing to us, and continues to be so with their MO Packs for Teachers. We’re very thankful for any support we receive from our community.”
SedonaKind is among the groups looking at how to fill the gap now that Manzanita is concentrating on food insecurity, which SedonaKind member Jawn McKinley said is “in very preliminary discussion.”
Burke added that the participating schools can either keep the cabinets or have Manzanita remove them.
Manzanita Outreach is currently doing 250 monthly distributions of its MO Packs for Kids, which provide free weekend food to anyone under the age of 19. Burke anticipates that the program will quadruple to 1,000 monthly distributions by the middle of 2024.
“We went through five months of strategic planning and one of the outcomes of that was answering the question, ‘Where can Manzanita do the most good for the most people?’” Burke said. “[But] all those resources are far better used with food … It’s an awesome program, and I hope other people do it. But we just can’t do it anymore.”
Burke added that any groups or individuals who would like to take on the school supply program on a per-school basis should contact him. “I would be available to show them everything. Give them the spreadsheets, tell them how we do it, and help them to continue it,” he said.
Burke can be reached at ben@manzanitaoutreach.org or at (928) 963-0739.
