No one bargain-shops like Sondra Moellenberndt.

She’s constantly on the lookout, patrolling Goodwills and garage sales for the next jackpot.

Like the time she filled the entire back seat and trunk of her car with new Old Navy backpacks, all for less than $2 each.

Or the 99-cent day at Lincoln’s Goodwill stores (“That was a fun day,” reminisces her friend and shopping partner, Laura Peetzke).

Moellenberndt and Peetzke aren’t afraid to ask store managers, “How low can you go?”

That’s because every bit of their shopping loot goes straight to foster children at their greatest time of need.

Moellenberndt runs Kits for Kids, a statewide program that provides necessities to foster children during the first few days of their first home placement.

Children are often removed from their homes without time to grab toiletries or keepsakes, and when they arrive at their first foster home, they may have only the clothes on their backs.

That’s what happened six years ago to the two boys Moellenberndt adopted from a woman for whom she did childcare. A week later, their clothes showed up in trash bags.

“It kind of tells the kids they’re garbage,” Peetzke said.

That’s when Moellenberndt decided to launch Kits for Kids, which gives kids everything from toothbrushes or decks of cards to diapers or bottles, all in a duffel bag or backpack that’s theirs to keep.

The kits play a vital role in getting kids and their new foster parents through the first week of a new placement, said Felicia Nelsen, office administrator for the Nebraska Foster and Adoptive Parent Association.

Foster parents who find out at dinnertime that they have a infant foster child coming to stay the night might not have time to pick up diapers or formula, Nelsen said. But a call or two through the Kits for Kids network can get a bag to the house within hours.

And it fills a critical need for older children, giving them something they can call their own.

“It’s something for a child that sometimes doesn’t have anything,” Nelsen said.

Moellenberndt runs the program from the basement of a downtown Aurora business. She calls it “The Cave” — a small room stocked floor-to-ceiling with shelves of clothes, sheets, bottles, quilts and mounds of backpacks.

When a call comes in, she gathers her daughters, including 21-year-old Crystal and 15-year-old Jeni, and friends like Peetzke to fill bags with items for various ages of boys and girls.

In the program’s first year, they filled 40 bags. In five months this year, they’ve already put together 400.

The supplies come from donations and, of course, Moellenberndt & Co.’s manic shopping habit.

This wasn’t the life she pictured for herself six years ago. With three daughters and an in-home day care, she had plenty on her hands. But when a troubled mother couldn’t raise her three children, all in Moellenberndt’s day care, the solution just made sense: a kinship adoption.

It didn’t take much to get her family on board, either.

“It was a 15-minute conversation, and we doubled the size of our family,” Crystal said.

Those three children are still experiencing the social and behavioral effects of their previous upbringing, but they’re an indispensable part of the family.

And the family could get larger, too. The Moellenberndts are one step away from being licensed to take in foster children.

Many foster children, Moellenberndt said, are ostracized as “trouble” or “problem” children, but are really just vulnerable children with rough backgrounds.

And her mission, at home and through Kits for Kids, is to show them love in their vulnerability.

“They’re a different group of kids because of what they’ve gone through,” she said. “They need that extra understanding, knowing that someone cares about them.”

The Grand Island Independent