CHESAPEAKE — Community Mission Outreach, an organization made up of local churches, will giveout gift bags and food boxes on Friday.

On Monday, volunteers from the group were gathered in the Chesapeake Community Center to put together the more than 400 gift bags that will be distributed to underprivileged kids in Lawrence County.

“We’re putting these gift bags together for the kids,” said Claire King, a volunteer with the CMO. “To go with these gift bags we’ll also be donating boxes of nonperishable food to roughly 600 families.”

The gift bags include toys, snacks, and other knick-knacks. The bags are also split up between age groups and genders.

“We put the bags in categories based on ages and if it goes to a boy or a girl,” King said. “The kids really enjoy it and for some of them these bags are really needed.”

The need for the gift bags and the food boxes is growing King says, as this year the numbers of those who applied for the charitable service stretched the groups resources thin.

“The economics of the time and our area are really hitting people hard,” King said. “So many more families registered to receive bags and boxes of food this year, that we really had to stretch our funds this year. But we do what we can.”

The group also received volunteer help from students at Chesapeake and Fairland high schools. King says the students provided a much-needed boast to the group and made the workload much easier.

“Most of the members of the community outreach are older,” she said. “These school kids came down to help us out and they just move so fast, so easy. They were a huge help, we really needed them.”