Orlando Chapter
Did you know 50,000 kids living in Brevard, Orange, Osceola, Polk, Seminole, and Volusia Counties are food insecure? That’s one in five kids who eat meals at school during the week but are without affordable, healthy food on Saturday and Sunday. The consequences are much more than a growling stomach. Hunger can cause many physical health problems- shortening a child’s attention span, lowering their IQ, and keeping them from making good grades.
That’s where Blessings in a Backpack can help.
Our mission is simple: we provide food on the weekends for school-aged children who might otherwise go hungry.
In May 2024, The Kate & Justin Rose Foundation Chapter of Blessings in a Backpack in Orlando celebrated its fourth anniversary as an official Blessings in a Backpack chapter!
- Feeding more kids! We started the chapter feeding around 2,200 kids. We started the 2024/25 school year feeding 4,200 kids!
- Grown our volunteer base! We started with only about 40, and we now have logged over 1,400 volunteer hours across Central Florida.
- Increased hunger-free weekends for Central Florida students! In our first year, we provided more than 81,000 hunger-free weekends. This school year we plan to provide over 155,000!
THANK YOU so much for helping to continue our success in our fifth year!
Our goal is to increase the number of children being served this school year. But we need your help!
You can help us reach that goal by:
Donating—as little as $160 feeds one child every weekend of the school year!
Getting involved
Partnering with our chapter
Click on the buttons below to get started!
In 2009, professional golfer Justin Rose and his wife Kate began partnering with Blessings in a Backpack to feed hungry bellies in Orlando.
In May 2020, the Kate & Justin Rose Foundation made a generous gift of $1.15 million to found The Kate & Justin Rose Foundation Chapter of Blessings in a Backpack in Orlando. In partnership with the national organization and under the direction of a regional advisory board and a managing director, this chapter will drive scalable growth to feed 16,000 children on the weekends throughout the school year by 2030!
“Food and children is just such an obvious essential,” said Kate Rose. “If you don’t have food in those tummies, nothing is going to make an impact. So we have just been trying to close a little bit of a gap in that area.”