The room looking out from Susan Morrison’s house onto Main Street in Warner had been intended as a repose for her elderly mother. Instead, it’s her photo — a facetious pointer finger wagging toward the camera, a soft expression without a trace of reprimand — that watches over the orderly bustle of Wednesday mornings.
Volunteers with Food for Thought, the nonprofit Morrison founded to alleviate food insecurity for elementary school students in the Kearsarge Regional School District, work in an efficient fashion.
Boxes of snacks migrate from ceiling-high shelving units onto the counter, where volunteers like Kay Shuster pack them into one-gallon Ziploc bags. The space, the size of a small bedroom, overflows with Pirate’s Booty, Snyder’s pretzels, veggie straws, Annie’s mac-and-cheese, granola bars and milk boxes of Horizon plain, whole milk.
Like many of the women who gather at Morrison’s house on packing day, early experiences witnessing poverty, food insecurity and want led Shuster, a former math and language arts teacher in Maine, to the local food pantry and, later, to Food for Thought.
“I was Title I for seventh and eighth grade, and I’m working with some of these kids — they could barely hold their heads up. They wanted to sleep. They were always hungry, they were coming to school hungry,” she said. “It really opened my eyes to see that it doesn’t matter who you are, you can always find yourself in that situation where you’re going without meals, without food. What are you going to do without food?”
Now in its third year, Food for Thought provides food assistance to children through a backpack program run in cooperation with school nurses and social workers. Need fluctuates: At the end of the last school year, Morrison and her volunteers were helping 70 students. This year, they’re packing food for 59 students.
The organization doesn’t require that families demonstrate need; there are no prerequisites for receiving a backpack. On Tuesdays, Morrison goes shopping, stretching dollars at wholesale stores like Sam’s Club and BJs. On Wednesdays, volunteers gather to help pack and make deliveries to schools. Nurses fill backpacks with the pre-packed food and send children home with enough to, ideally, last through the weekend.
When school isn’t in session and breakfast and lunch aren’t guaranteed, the backpacks serve their purpose, alleviating some pressure on parents to provide.
“All the prices are going up, and with the deal with the oil situation, the cost of everything is just going to continue to rise,” she said. “When it comes to food and medical care and everything else, it only takes one thing to throw a person or a family off financially: the furnace goes, the car breaks down. That can change their whole way of living.”
Reflecting on the kaleidoscope of life experiences that brought Morrison to dedicate her time to food insecurity makes her choke up with emotion.
Once a volunteer with the Upper Valley Haven’s Community Food Market in White River Junction, Vt., Morrison walked through the aisles with a woman who had been donating to the food pantry the year before. It was clear to Morrison that admitting her need to rely on food assistance cost the woman greatly.
“I could draw this moment. I remember her so well. And I probably will never forget her until I forget everything,” Morrison said.
The fingerprint of Morrison’s mother, Eleanor Blackwell, endures in the work of her nonprofit. Blackwell was a child of the Great Depression, a school teacher in small-town Pennsylvania who always had a drawer full of food and a heart full of charity.
“She knew the kids that were hungry, and the families that were struggling, and so she always had food for them,” she said. “We were not wealthy, we didn’t have a lot of money at all, really, but I never felt that way.”
When Blackwell passed away in 2022, the modest inheritance she left became the seed money for Food for Thought.
Now, the nonprofit’s operations cost around $30,000 a year, with Morrison spending between $10 and $12 per student per week. A two-year, $10,000 grant from the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation helps support part of those expenditures, but the majority of those funds come from the private donations of local individuals, families and churches.
The Kearsarge Food Hub contributes apples every week, and in October, when the federal government announced it would not fund SNAP benefits the following month, one of Morrison’s neighbors raised over $4,000 to send Market Basket gift cards to each family that participated in Food for Thought.
For as astounding as the generosity and goodwill is of locals, so is the need.
“One thing that a lot of people don’t realize is how much need we have here. You know, I’ve learned that I’ve delivered food to people who live in tents in the woods,” Morrison said. “I can’t tell you how many times people have said, ‘Really, we have a need for this here?’ Yeah, it’s hiding in plain sight.”
In the kitchen of Morrison’s home on Wednesday, Shuster minded her back as she lowered bags of groceries onto the floor — in a few weeks, the 71-year-old will be riding her bike from Oregon back to New Hampshire, raising funds for Food for Thought along the way.
Around the island, Beth Lamanna and Connie Jankoski layered cinnamon raisin bagels, Hawaiian dinner rolls, containers of Motts apple sauce and other “squishables” into food storage containers.
The snacks reflect a focus on healthier, more nutritious foods: no high fructose corn syrup, no artificial dyes, little added sugar and no hydrogenated oils, with the exception of peanut butter — volunteers have learned some children don’t like when natural peanut butter separates and oil pools at the top.
Jankoski, a former research scientist and chemistry professor, has been involved with Food for Thought from the start. From her tenured perspective, Morrison is the “brain and heart of the operation.”
For her part, Morrison insists there’s nothing laudable or special about the work she and her 12 volunteers do. Instead, their ability to commit to their work is a question of opportunity.
“I think the majority of people would want to help and do the work,” she said. “I think that we have a lot of good people around us, and so I’m not special, we’re not special, but we just can do it.”
Learn more about Food for Thought at https://foodforthoughtnh.org/
