ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Visit The Kind Mouse food bank, and you can get dizzy watching the kids scurry round and round a table loaded with food bins grabbing snacks to fill bags.
“The little ones are 'Mice in Training' and the older ones are 'Mice Interns,'” explains charity founder Gina Wilkins.
And those snack bags? Well, they’re called "Mouse Nibbles." Are you detecting a pattern here?
Each week, bins full of Mouse Nibbles are loaded into vans and delivered to a dozen Pinellas schools including Shore Acres Elementary. The Mouse Nibbles are then distributed to students who might be going hungry on the weekends.
Wilkins, whose father nicknamed her Mouse on the day she was born, started the not-for-profit 12 years ago.
“I just don’t think anyone should be hungry. That should just be a given that you have food in your refrigerator and for a lot of families it’s not. And it’s getting worse and worse really,” Wilkins said.
All the good work of The Kind Mouse doesn’t happen without a lot of volunteers. Besides the kids who help out, so does a group of senior ladies who turn up every week to date food items.
The group does not have a mouse nickname, but "The Golden Girls" do have hearts of gold.
“I had four children of my own who never had to struggle for food and it really bothers me that there are children like that out there,” says Joan Wilters, who has been volunteering at The Kind Mouse since its inception.
Noreen Hodges says memories of her own childhood, “no bathroom, not much food, not much money” spurs her to now help others. And she says volunteering does her soul good. “Oh, absolutely,” Hodges said. “You cannot buy that kind of medicine!”
The young volunteers here do more than just go round and round a table. At The Kind Mouse, they also receive training on just what it takes to run a not-for-profit group, including how to answer questions from reporters.
To prove that point, 15-year-old Mia Prom steps up to the microphone.
“We’re actually teaching the next generation of leaders how to give back and have a kind heart and to learn that being hungry just doesn’t mean being homeless; it can be a friend or a coworker,” she states with confidence.
You could say The Kind Mouse is really a “Mighty Mouse” fighting hunger with kindness.
10 Tampa Bay and our parent company’s foundation are happy to support The Kind Mouse with a $2,000 TEGNA Foundation grant.
You can contact The Kind Mouse at 727-575-7834.