Volunteers meet at Church at Rock Creek each week to stuff nutritious food into backpacks, which  are then distributed to schools and sent home with students who might go hungry on weekends.

With a full slate of ministries already rolling at Church at Rock Creek, Little Rock pastor Mark Evans wasn’t necessarily looking for another one. But during an interview for a local newspaper story, the question came up: “If you could change one thing, what would you change?” Evans’ response: “I would end hunger in central Arkansas,” he says. “The director of the Arkansas Foodbank Network called me the Monday after the article appeared and said, ‘I want to talk to you about your answer to that question.’ And that’s kind of how this program began.”

What grew out of that conversation was Feed Arkansas Kids, a program for putting kid-friendly, nutritious food—breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks—into the hands of children who otherwise might go hungry on the weekends. For these children, school meals are their only reliable source of food and in many cases the only balanced meal they will get on any given day. Feed Arkansas Kids packs backpacks with food to nourish children through the weekend when school is not in session. It’s a formal enough operation that it’s incorporated as its own 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.

The premise is as simple as the problem is acute: According to “Hunger in America 2014,” prepared for the Arkansas Foodbank, children make up a significant percentage of the people the Foodbank served in 2013. In fact, children ages 6 to 17 represent the second largest category of recipients, at nearly 23 percent. All told, kids 18 and under represent around a third of the almost 280,000 people the Foodbank estimates it served in 2013, or about 80,000 children. Sobering as that is, the study’s authors readily admit that due to surveying methodology and data collection restrictions, the actual number is unquestionably higher.

The rapid growth of the Feed Arkansas Kids ministry is another testament to the scope of the problem. In just two years, the program went from an idea to actively putting food into the hands of more than 1,000 children each week in 38 central Arkansas schools. “The numbers grow because enrollments in school districts change. We might have 17 one month at a school, but then they get three more over the next month and so they’ll adjust their numbers,” Evans says. “Our commitment is, once we start to feed a child at the beginning of the school year, we’re going to do it every weekend for the rest of the school year.”

Given that fluctuation as well as the crushing scope of the issue to begin with, the pressure to accommodate more and more children is constant—as is the need for funding to help make it all happen. “Our need is funding, obviously,” Evans says. “You can do the math; it costs us about $6 per child per week for, basically, seven meals in that bag plus snacks and a couple of drinks. That’s over $6,000 per weekend. When you consider the need is really somewhere around 1,600 or 1,700 children, right now we’re about 600 kids short.”

The program demonstrates what can be accomplished when community resources come together. Church at Rock Creek congregants donate the funds to buy the food items, which are ordered through the Arkansas Foodbank Network. Local businesses also help underwrite the cost of materials and food. Church members pack the food into backpacks which are delivered to participating schools in the Little Rock, North Little Rock, Sheridan, Benton, Bryant and Pulaski County Special School Districts.

The volunteers never know the identity of the children who benefit from their labors, so Evans reminds his flock in sermons that hunger is a problem without a zip code—in fact, someone hungry could be sitting among them on any given Sunday. He also rarely misses the chance to leverage support of the program as a tangible witness to faith in action.

“I don’t believe in America that children should have to go hungry. I just think that’s wrong on so many levels, but especially with the churches in America. The way we’re equipped, we ought to do everything that we can to end childhood hunger.”