Every afternoon, this Missouri mom of six comes home to pack lunches for the kids — a whole neighborhood of them.
Champale Anderson, 48, gets off her job in health care every day around 12:30 p.m. and begins preparing a tableful of food.
By 2:30, she’s out by the school bus stop in her poverty-stricken neighborhood in northern St. Louis — a community she calls “beautiful.”
“Those kids are waiting on me. I have to be out there because they are so excited,” Anderson told “Good Morning America,” adding that she knows what it’s like to need a hand.
“I didn’t have a great childhood. It was pretty rough,” Anderson said. “That made me not want any other kid to go through that.”
Anderson started her grassroots charity, Champ’s Tear Drops, when she noticed children begging for spare change near a gas station and realized that friends of her children, who range in age from 8 to 25, were coming over to her home hungry.
“Sometimes kids get a bag and come back to my house around 7 p.m. because that may be the only meal they have during the day,” said Anderson, who is also known to give out breakfast in the morning and drive students to school if they miss the bus. “They ask for another bag and I say, ‘Of course.’ ”
With the help of her own children and their grateful friends, she makes and serves a variety of chips, cookies, drinks and deli meat sandwiches, when she can afford it.
“They never know what I will have in the bag. I switch it up — special treats for my special babies,” she told local station KTVI-TV.
Her specialty? PB&J.
“I don’t just put on the peanut butter and then the jelly,” she said. “I mix it up with love.”
She told KTVI that local parents are grateful and try to help if they can.
“The parents always tell me ‘thank you,’ ” said Anderson. “I have one young lady, she doesn’t have much, but she’ll bring a jar of peanut butter or a pack of cookies, whatever she can.”
In a bid for more donations, Anderson created a GoFundMe page, asking for $1,500 to buy more food for the kids. The campaign has brought in nearly $39,000.
Anderson said her big dream is to open a public recreational center for kids in her neighborhood.
“I know I can’t stop [hard times],” she said, “but I know I can slow it down just a little bit.”
