Community Corner
Loudoun County Students Need Your Help!
It's easy to make a difference with Food For Neighbors!
Over 2,700 households in Northern Virginia are working with Food For Neighbors (FFN) to end teen food insecurity. Help us reach 2,800 so we can better fill the weekend food gap for students in your local secondary schools! Sign up to donate food up to five times per year via our popular Red Bag Program. You’ll be helping students attending Ashburn area schools, where our program is rapidly expanding. Currently participating schools include Belmont Ridge Middle School, Stone Hill Middle School, and Stone Bridge High School. Additionally, the Red Bag Program supports Sterling area schools including River Bend, Seneca Ridge, and Sterling middle schools as well as Dominion, Park View, Potomac Falls, and Robey high schools.
Donating food via our Red Bag Program is very easy!
- Request a Bag: Visit our website to learn more and register as a food and toiletry donor. An FFN volunteer will drop off a Red Bag with a tag noting our grocery list and five annual collection dates. (Don’t worry. We’ll touch base in advance to see if you’re available on any particular date.)
- Fill Your Bag: The next time you’re at the grocery store, shop for some of the items on the grocery list.
- Leave Your Bag Out: On the requested dates, put your food and toiletry donations in your Red Bag and place the Red Bag on your doorstep. A volunteer will collect your donations and leave you a new Red Bag for the next collection. The volunteer brings your donations to the nearest of nine working sites, where additional community members sort the food and toiletries and deliver them to participating schools near you.
During each of our Red Bag Events, we’re currently collecting well over 20,000 pounds of food and toiletries to help students in 42 Northern Virginia middle and high schools. As the number of students we serve continues to grow, your donations are key to helping the most vulnerable students in your local schools. School staff have shared that the reliable, supplemental food helps students attend school more regularly, focus on their schoolwork, and earn better grades.
Find out what's happening in Ashburnwith free, real-time updates from Patch.
A Loudoun County Public Schools social worker shared, "Being in an area that's the 'anomaly' in Loudoun County Public Schools (richest county in the U.S.), our families have literally been brought to tears on multiple occasions with both receiving food and receiving gift cards from the FFN program. It truly helps ease the burdens our families are carrying from house fires, to trauma, to financial concerns, and shows them that people DO care. Our families are always so grateful for the support FFN provides as it is one less thing they have to carry such worry about— putting food on their family's table."
Hunger is closer than you think. Sign up today to donate food and toiletries. If you prefer, you may make a financial donation to help us to continue to help students at our currently-partnering schools and to say “yes” to new schools requesting our support.
