Needs
Essential School Pantries — $25,000 for Supporting Learning, Stability, and Opportunity
Neighborhood Wellness Foundation seeks support to operate Essential Pantries at five school sites in Del Paso Heights and surrounding communities — Woodlake Elementary, MLK Tech Academy, Grant Union High School, Capital College and Career Academy, and the SCOE Senior Extension (including youth supported by Kids with Kids).
The pantries are part of NW’s ROOTS to RISE approach, integrating all four service pathways — Pacers Take Space, Higher Heights, Restore Legacies, and Healing Circles. While NW provides behavioral health support, mentorship, family engagement, and pathways to education and employment, students cannot fully benefit when basic needs remain unmet.
Food insecurity and basic needs instability affect attendance, concentration, and classroom behavior. Some students arrive at school hungry or without hygiene supplies or appropriate clothing, and stigma and transportation barriers limit access to outside resources. Many girls also experience period poverty, missing class due to lack of menstrual products and losing instructional time. These unmet needs increase stress and reduce school engagement.
School-based Essential Pantries provide confidential access to nutritious food, hygiene items, clothing, and menstrual products, while also serving as an entry point to NW supports and connections to longer-term community resources.
Rapid-Response Support for families in crisis——$25,000
especially when unexpected life events threaten their ability to keep themselves and their children safe. For many families, one emergency can trigger a chain reaction: a missed paycheck becomes unpaid rent, a flat tire becomes loss of transportation, a utility shutoff becomes unsafe heat or cold, and a lack of diapers, food, or gas becomes a daily crisis. These funds will help provide rental assistance to prevent eviction and homelessness; transportation support, including tire repairs and other automobile needs that improve driving safety; emergency food; utility assistance to ensure families have heat or air conditioning during extreme temperatures; diapers; and other essential supports for parents, including our “kids with kids” who are still developing while raising children of their own.
Through our work, we see how crisis creates navigational paralysis—when systems are too complex, stressful, or inaccessible for families already overwhelmed by trauma, poverty, grief, housing instability, or fear. Neighborhood Wellness does more than provide temporary relief. We walk with families as they build the foundational capacities needed to stabilize, ask for help, complete paperwork, attend appointments, communicate with agencies, and move from crisis response to long-term resilience. This support is critical because disrupting intergenerational trauma and poverty requires meeting urgent needs while also strengthening the skills, confidence, and connections that help families stay safe, housed, supported, and hopeful.