Love San Clemente, a nonprofit organization dedicated to serving its community, is planning on expanding its activities in town in 2024 by collaborating with Las Palmas Elementary School.
The idea for the new initiative, dubbed Feed the Kids SC, came to Love San Clemente leader Holland Davis after a fateful conversation with friend Bill McLeod, co-founder and president of Got Your Back San Diego.
Feed the Kids is intended to follow the model set by Got Your Back, a program that provides food on the weekends to children in food-insecure families.
“Some of the stories are just incredible,” Davis said. “He just recently heard the story of a family (whose) dinner for the weekend was a bag of popcorn.”
That, combined with a discussion with the mother of a Las Palmas student concerning the number of students registered as homeless, prompted Davis’ intentions to create a program seeking to feed all San Clemente children over the weekend.
“There’s all kinds of things when you look at what happens when you don’t eat, (as) you fall asleep in class, you become isolated, (and) you’re a behavioral issue,” he said.
By starting Feed the Kids, they hope to help children in the short-term and make them better students.
Davis launched Love San Clemente at around the same time he founded Calvary Chapel San Clemente in 2010, reaching low-income families, military families, schools and the elderly, and doing city projects.
“I wanted to do something to reach out to our city, but I wanted it to be practical, I wanted to be helpful, and I wanted it to be bigger than just one organization,” he said, adding, “We launched Love San Clemente with a very simple tagline, to show God’s love in practical ways.”
Previous projects have included cleaning trash around the city, food drives, and gardening and painting veterans’ homes as a way to “love-bomb” San Clemente. However, those opportunities to gather and serve dried up with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Feed the Kids presents a new way for the organization to go out into San Clemente, and after speaking with officials from Las Palmas, Davis and his team determined the school had 10 children who fit the demographic of highly food-insecure. That team includes Randy Peykoff, who is heading the initiative.
“We receive, right now, donations from pretty much anybody,” Peykoff said. “We have a specific list of high-quality foods, (and) we don’t give the kids any budget items or off-brand names.”
Officials from Las Palmas Elementary School could not be reached for comment as of this posting.
The organization will strictly distribute non-perishables, such as canned dinners, shelf-stable milk, and other single-serving foodstuffs. People can make donations to Calvary Chapel throughout each week before Love San Clemente assembles donation packages on Thursdays and delivers them to Las Palmas on Friday mornings.
The first distribution is scheduled for Jan. 12.
Davis described success for their new venture as receiving positive feedback from teachers in terms of student performance, as well as sustained donations from the community. Feed the Kids will start slow, but Davis affirmed his desire for the program to broaden.
“I was talking with a teacher at San Clemente (High School) and she goes, ‘I have 17 students that would benefit from that program,’ ” he recalled.
Got Your Back San Diego feeds more than 400 children each weekend from 12 San Diego County schools, and Davis said it would be “awesome” to achieve a similar feat in San Clemente.
“We just want to take care of the kids in our community,” said Davis.
More information about Feed the Kids and Love San Clemente is available at lovesanclemente.com.