Emma Wiese, far left, and Kylee Fortune, third from left, were among Webster City students who helped build and stock blessing boxes in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, last summer. They were hosted by The Dwelling, a Lutheran church headed by Emily Harkins, lead pastor and mission developer, whose mother is from Webster City.

These are people who, through a combination of factors — unemployment, stagnant wages, lack of health insurance, and the worst inflation since the 1970s — don’t know where their next meal is coming from.

With demand for food assistance at a historical high, it’s a grim reality that funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — SNAP, commonly known as food stamps — has been seriously eroded by the federal government.

Food stamps as they are known today were first distributed in 1964.

Sarah Anderson, Faith Formation director at Trinity Lutheran Church, Webster City, is mobilizing the church’s youth group to start a new project in 2026 that has the potential to expand and improve distribution of free food in Webster City.

The idea for the project, called “blessing boxes,” began three years ago when Anderson took her students on a summer trip to Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Hosted there by a local Evangelical Lutheran Church in America church called The Dwelling, Anderson’s youth group “did the hard work to help those not living a comfortable life,” as Anderson puts it.

Most of the families aided by the work there are, or have previously been, homeless.

The six-day program includes normal church youth group of activities: prayer, worship and group meals. Most days also include five hours at a “service site,” where students help provide for the many needs of those in need, including housing, food and transportation.

“We rebuild and refinish furniture, we repair bicycles, we even buy tents for the homeless,” Anderson said.

Just as important, Anderson added, is what the kids don’t do.

“We don’t eat in restaurants and we sleep on a church floor, so our kids can’t miss the message: This is uncomfortable, this is a struggle. This is life for many people across our country every day.”

Anderson and her middle and high school youth have returned to Winston-Salem to help with the local blessing box program for each of the last three summers.

A blessing box resembles one of the little free libraries seen in Webster City neighborhoods, only larger. Instead of books, they hold and dispense nonperishable food.

In 2026, Anderson and Trinity Lutheran will build blessing boxes to put up across Webster City.

“We’ll fundraise to buy the materials, we’ll build and place the blessing boxes, and we’ll ask local people, businesses and other organizations to sponsor them,” Anderson said.

Sponsorship is as easy as pledging to keep the box filled with food for a prescribed period of time.

“Participants in our trips to Winston-Salem, whether our youth group kids or their parents or chaperones who go along, come home hungry to help people here,” Anderson said. “We have homeless people here; we have food-insecure people here with nowhere to turn. This can be part of the solution.”