At any given time, a massive pile of food is strewn about a table and the corners of a small room at St. John’s Lutheran Church. Every week, that pile gets a little bit smaller, only to be replenished again.

For the past year, the church has assisted Sumner Elementary with what has been a growing problem in Austin: hunger. Each Thursday, several members from St. John’s fill 40 backpacks with food, so students and their siblings can have enough to eat when they’re not at school.

A chalk board with simple directions sits in that small room. A volunteer grabs a backpack, reads its tag and fills it with enough food depending on what the tag designates.

The process takes about an hour, and those 40 backpacks — often jam-packed — help fill the stomachs of nearly 140 kids in Austin.

“I think it’s wonderful,” said Meri Jo Lonergan, a member of St. John’s social ministries board who helps fill packs when help is needed.

Lonergan, like the others who fill backpacks at St. John’s, was surprised to see how severe the need is for food assistance in Austin. That’s just partly why she helps.

“I guess you never realize there’s that much of it,” Lonergan said about the need for food assistance. “Until you see something like this, you don’t realize that need is there.”

While helping some unfortunate people, Lonergan and the others are serving their church’s mission statement, as well.

“Our mission statement is proclaim, encourage, witness and serve,” said Sharry Watkins, who helps fill the backpacks and deliver them every week.

Watkins was formerly president of the social ministries board but continues to fill backpacks each week. She recalled the church’s mission statement after remembering how Wendy Kusick helped employ the program.

Kusick, a St. John’s member and Sumner Elementary teacher, followed every aspect of St. John’s mission statement. She served because she mentioned the need for the backpack program, encouraged the social ministries board to get involved and has witnessed it become a success at Sumner Elementary.

For ease, Sumner and St. John’s used an existing method, which streamlines the process. Teachers send forms home with students who may need assistance, parents return the forms to the school, and kids are sent home every Friday with their own designated backpack.

On the church’s end, members of St. John’s receive a steady flow of items from the local Salvation Army, which gets those items directly from Channel One. Winnie Greenlee makes that process easier, too. She’s not only a member of St. John’s, she volunteers at the Salvation Army’s food shelf. She sees what comes in, and she knows what items kids need. So volunteers don’t just cram items into bags, they assure that each kid gets an adequate amount of protein, fiber, calcium, a fruit item and juice.

While that helps 40 students and their siblings at Sumner, the problem is much larger than that, according to Sumner Principal Sheila Berger. Hunger is a growing issue in Austin. It inevitably affects students at all schools, especially Sumner, where nearly 75 percent of students are on free-reduced lunches. Berger knows the discrepancy between people taking backpacks and those using free lunches means many kids are going home hungry on the weekends.

“That just takes care of meals at school,” Berger said about free school lunches. “If we have that many kids that are below the poverty line, food outside of school has to be an issue as well.”

In the year that the backpack program has been at Sumner, St. John’s has increased its donations by 15 backpacks to fill the need.

Yet some kids will be missed because the program is confidential and operates on a speculative basis. Sometimes kids don’t show signs of hunger, and school officials won’t know about their potential issues at home. For that reason, Sumner officials hope to start a pantry at the school that they can show to parents and raise awareness about hunger.

“That’s our goal is that no kid leaves here hungry, or comes back hungry because weekends are long, and sometimes nights are long,” Berger said.

Back at St. John’s, volunteers hope for more backpack programs around the community. Berger and St. John’s members were only aware of such a program at Sumner.

St. John’s volunteers hope other churches and schools in Austin can form partnerships, because as Lonergan put it, “There couldn’t be anything worse than for a child to be hungry.”