What does hunger look like to the many people in our service area who must face it each month? Hunger is skipping a meal so your children can eat. It’s buying medicine or paying a utility bill instead of groceries. It’s scraping and budgeting and doing the best you can to make ends meet but still not having enough money left over for food at the end of the month. Many of us will never know what true food insecurity feels like, but hunger is not a “them” problem – it affects the entire community.
With 1 in 7 people in our service area facing hunger, it is guaranteed that someone you know, someone in your community will deal with food insecurity at some point in their lives. It could be your neighbor, your grandparents, your daughter’s best friend, or perhaps someone sitting next to you in church. Hunger knows no boundaries of race, age or gender. It’s a pervasive problem with no end in sight.
But still we fight.
Demand for our services increased 20 percent because of the pandemic. These are people who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own, or who are in a rough spot and need a hand up. Many of the people reaching out to us have never needed the services of a food pantry before, and yet now are facing something they never thought they would.
Much of the country has begun to return to some semblance of normal, yet there still is much work to be done. Families with school-aged children have been disproportionately affected because of the pandemic, and so more than ever, we need your help.
So many of you have stepped up to provide assistance over the last year and a half and that has meant so much to the people we serve, our neighbors in need. Your support – your donation – doesn’t just provide a one-time fix for an individual or family. It provides Hope, Encouragement and Dignity. When someone facing hunger is able to pick up a box of produce, dairy and meat at a food distribution, they have one less worry weighing them down. When a child receives a bag of kid-friendly items through the BackPack Program in their county, they know they’ll have food to eat throughout the weekend when breakfast and lunch isn’t provided through school.
This may seem like a drop in the bucket to the overall issue of hunger, but we can guarantee that it isn’t inconsequential to the families who rely on our help.
So let’s face this head on. Visit feedingamericaky.org/donate and provide a little extra hope to a food-insecure family.
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