18th Annual December BackPack Campaign!
Ensure that the most vulnerable children in our community have the food they need, while also providing essential funding for WFDD.
Your support of 88.5 WFDD means everything to us. Your generosity allows us to provide award-winning local news coverage, national and international news, youth education initiatives, special events that help us all stay connected, and so much more.
Right now, when you make a gift in any amount to support everything you value about WFDD, our partner Kaplan Early Learning Company will donate a backpack full of nutritious, kid-friendly food to Second Harvest Food Bank's BackPack Program. The goal is 1,000 gifts of support for WFDD, which means 1,000 backpacks of food!
Over the last 17 years, this very special fund drive has filled 18,000 backpacks of food for children in our region who are at risk of hunger. And none of that would have happened without the support of listeners and our amazing community. Together, we'll add 1,000 more backpacks to that total. Your gift now means more outstanding programming in the year to come, and it helps feed a child in need in our community.
According to Second Harvest Food Bank, our state ranks among the worst in the nation for the percentage of children living at risk of hunger. More than 500,000 North Carolina children face hunger — more than 1 in 5 statewide, according to Feeding America’s Map the Meal Gap 2026. That means many kids don't know where their next meal may come from.The weekend meal gap is real: School meals carry many kids through the week. On Friday afternoon, that support stops until Monday. Thanks in part to the BackPack Program, each Friday during the school year, children identified as at risk of hunger take home a backpack of nutritious, kid-friendly, easy-to-prepare food for the weekend.
Click here to learn more about childhood hunger in Northwest North Carolina. And click here to check out Feeding America's interactive "Map the Meal Gap" map.