Plants come with stakes to identify them and with instructions for nurturing to ensure they will flourish. We know all kids are individual and need proper nourishing too. Building on this theme, The National CACFP Forum’s Capitol Hill advocacy initiative for FY2008 will include presenting our elected officials with “kid stakes.” The front of each stake will look like the one on this page. The back will be plain, the idea being that the name, age, city and state for each child can be written on the back. An alternative is to have children make their own plant stakes by cutting heavy paper into the stake shape and personalizing both sides, rather than ordering the pre-printed plant stakes.

We need your help and are asking sponsors to get the message and the stakes out to providers so that we will have thousands of stakes to present to Senators and Representatives during our legislative visits this year. Our past initiatives have been impressive on Capitol Hill. With your help, the “kid stake” will be too!

There are many ways of presenting the thousands of “kid stakes.” A couple ideas are to plant many stakes in one flowerpot and present to the appropriate Congressperson, or staple them around a paper plate to make them look like blossoms. So the task of sponsors/advocates is to let providers know of the initiative and distribute and collect stakes so that as many stakes as possible are collected.

The original Kid Stake Publisher file (one stake per page) is here. One of our members created a Publisher file that has 8 stakes per page here; use it to make several copies at one time – just add your own child’s picture and organization logo, if you wish. Or, for large quantities please contact the supplier directly –The John Henry Co. @ 800-748-0517 ext 2601 [Growercare@MultiPkg.com] and let them know you want the “CACFP Kid Stakes.” Prices are $38.27 per 1,000 if ordered in multiples of 5,000, or $47.82 when ordered in multiples of 1,000.