Growing up Blessings: Camden

Blessings in a Backpack has helped a million kids since its incorporation in 2008. Dedicated volunteers who have given countless hours to purchase food, pack, and distribute—so the kids in their communities have enough food on the weekends.

For some volunteers, Blessings is all they have ever known.

Camden Doerrer was in kindergarten when his mom Jennifer started a Blessings in a Backpack program in their Ohio city of Green. Camden would tag along to packing events, he and his three older brothers would load donations each Sunday collected by church members, knowing they would be packing this food into bags later that week. Some of Camden’s earliest memories are checking the expiration dates on donated food to ensure all the food being collected and distributed was good.

For Camden, the Blessings program opened his eyes to understand that not every kid in his community had enough to eat. Volunteering with Blessings has also created a network for him. He’s met community leaders in Green, who often volunteer their time to help. Those relationships have continued as he is part of a Student Municipal program that places high school students on government committees.

Camden plans on attending college in the fall and knows community service will continue to be a big part of his life. Last year, he had the most service hours of any member of the National Honor Society. He competes on the school’s swim team and is in over 10 different groups at his high school. With law school and a potential political career in his future, the lifetime of service work he began at age five shows no sign of stopping.

Jennifer Doerrer says the volunteer work Camden and her other sons—one graduating law school, another a med student, and one focused on becoming a CPA—helped them establish roots in their community of Green. They all want to come back here and continue to give back to the community they have served all their lives. “Running the Blessings program—you concentrate on feeding kids, raising money, purchasing food, and distributing it. You don’t realize the benefits to kids and families that give back—as a parent, you don’t realize you are teaching your child to be an empathetic, world citizen.”