Community Involvement

Food Collection for Billings Area School Pantries

Our hope is to collect enough foods and snacks to fill ALL schools pantries for a year and allow them to help any students in need.

Here are some numbers and statistics:

• Currently serving over 400 students through the pantry program (that is a conservative figure and Senior high has the highest usage)
• There is a pantry in every school (32+ the Rimrock Learning Center and Lincoln Center)
• It is hard to quantify the number of pounds that go out each week but we have a group that gives us about 500lbs/month, and it is all utilized every month
• The approximate cost to purchase the amount of food donated every month is $2,000/month

Items we'd love to get are: "snack" type food and quick meals for on the go more often:

granola bars, jerky, mac and cheese cups, cup-o-noodles, snack and go tuna, breakfast bars, cheese and crackers, peanut butter and cracker snacks, trail mix, pretzels, capri sun, individual protein shakes, squeeze applesauce, spaghettiOs, individual cereals, individual cups of oatmeal and shelf stable milk.

Our goal is to collect a minimum of 5,000 lbs of DONATED food (hopefully more) , and then Lithia CJD Billings will match up to 5,000 lbs.

This breaks down to about 166 cans / lbs a day (1lbs items) So between items donated and Lithia's 5,000lbs match, we hope to collect a total of 10,000 lbs or MORE!

Collections are available from 8am on December 1st, 2023 until 7pm on December 20th, 2023 at Lithia CJD of Billings.