Brandon Underwood, a member of Open Arms, Belleville, is a Kindergarten teacher at Tyler Elementary in Belleville. The school serves 400 kids, 63% of which are low income. A quarter of those 400 students don’t get much food apart from the school meals.
Brandon and his mother, Dana, have been involved with Open Arms’ homeless ministry in Detroit (serving lunches to 150 homeless people, doing clothing drives and collecting home goods for transitional housing), but they were looking for something more local to focus their attention on. At one of the church board meetings in May, Rev. Larry Courson (who has been serving as Interim pastor at Open Arms since 2022) mentioned that Tyler School is only 1.5 miles away and asked what the church could do to help. Ideas were bounced around and someone mentioned a backpack ministry that provides food for kids during the weekend, when they don’t have access to school breakfast/lunch. Brandon, who is also one of the board members, went home and told his mom and, in his words, “we kind of ran with it.” Dana called Courson that same night to volunteer to run the program.
Courson said, “It started with an idea and nothing else. We didn’t have a backpack, we didn’t have any food; we had nothing other than the need and the teacher and a mom who was willing to help.” Team Tigers (named after Tyler school’s mascot) started at the same time as summer school on July 15, which means the church had less than two months to come up with the food and the backpacks so they could send them home with the kids the first week.
They served 26 students (out of 100 enrolled) during summer school. At that time, Open Arms Daycare was holding a summer camp. Older campers do service projects, and one of the projects was packing food into the backpacks. Initially, everything was stored in Pastor Courson’s office and the first two packings were done there, but then the church built a locked closet for the pantry where the food and the backpacks are kept.
Fast forward to September. School just started again, so forms were just sent out to all families. Brandon explained that food-deficient families will return the form so that their students can receive a backpack full of food on Fridays. They are then expected to return the backpack on Mondays so it can be packed and sent home the next Friday. The backpacks are numbered in case the nametags get lost and also as a way to keep track of how many meals each child should receive. Each backpack has a tiger keychain to identify Team Tigers. This year they are just doing this for Kindergarten, but the goal is to eventually reach all grades.
During the worship service on September 8, Courson’s sermon was based on James 2:17 (“So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead”) and emphasized being the hands and feet of Christ. To exemplify this, he read a text that Dana had sent him earlier. She wrote, “Team Tigers is definitely a blessing to these students. Brandon has a student who went for the free breakfast. As soon as she got to class, she asked Brandon when lunch is. Immediately after lunch, she asked when snack time was. That poor baby was hungry! Brandon reached out to mom to tell her about Team Tigers and told her he sent a survey home for her to fill out for next week. Mom was very appreciative and said they didn’t have very much food, so we put together a backpack for her for this weekend. She has a sister in pre-k at another school, so we packed extra food for her as well. Broke my heart but I’m so happy that we are able to help these kids!!”
If anyone would like to contribute to this ministry, there are a few options. Monetary donations can made during worship on Sundaysat 10 a.m. or by coming to the office during normal business hours; checks can be mailed to Open Arms Lutheran Church and Day Care; 7865 Belleville Rd.; Belleville MI 48111. Alternatively, one can make donations through the website openarmscenter.com. If you would like to donate food (non-perishable items ONLY), there are tonation bins located both outside and inside the building; you can drop off at any time.
Photos by Elisa Schulz/Michigan District, LCMS
