New kitchen to feed hungry Valley kids

WASILLA — At around 6 p.m. Monday, Ginger Okumoto starts handing plates of pasta over one half of a Dutch door in the Boys and Girls Club.

“Why don’t you take that and go sit down and come back for your milk?” she suggests to one youngster, leaning over as she does to accommodate his inability to reach as high as the shelf atop the half door.

Okumoto was working from an expanded, renovated kitchen at the club, installed courtesy of The Children’s Lunchbox, an arm of Anchorage charitable stalwart Bean’s Café that focuses on feeding hungry children.

Program Director Lynette Ortolano said the Wasilla clubhouse kitchen marks a first for the program — it’s finally venturing out of Anchorage.

“I live in the Valley,” Ortolano said, and when she took over as director “it was kind of my goal to get us out here.”

Lunchbox started serving meals in the Valley in December, but the kitchen is a recent addition. Prior to that, it provided food for Denali Family Services at its Wasilla office.

“They would drive into town and pick up their meals,” Ortolano said. “They’re pretty excited that we have a kitchen out here now.”

The kitchen manager, Ortolano said, wasn’t particularly hard to find. Jeff Traxinger, a former military man, was working at the Boys and Girls Club at the time on a contract. He made the switch and it’s worked out well, Ortolano said.

Ortolano said they plan to offer three meals a day during the summer for any kid who needs one. During the school year, they’ll probably scale it back to just dinner, since breakfast and lunch are taken care of in the schools.

The idea is to use the Boys and Girls Club kitchen as sort of base of operations for the Valley, supplying meals at summer camps and other similar programs. Ortolano said she’s already talked to the Salvation Army in Palmer about supplying food during that organization’s summer programs. She said Lunchbox prefers to work with those kind of established organizations.

“We try and choose places where kids are given some guidance,” she said.

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.