Folks its Harvest for Hunger time and we need to raise $125,000 between today and October 10th to help feed our area hungry through the holidays. Recently, our Feeding America network of food banks conducted two national hunger studies. These studies revealed that we have over 88,000 people within the Big Bend Region who are food insecure, 24,000 of these folks are children. This means that these people are often forced to skip meals due to not being able to purchase enough food for a healthy lifestyle. 75% of those polled revealed that they often have to choose between paying for utilities and buying food. 83% reported using multiple strategies for getting enough food in the past12 months, including eating food past the expiration date, selling personal property, and watering down food or drinks. 65% of households often have to choose between paying rent or mortgage and buying food. Many seem to believe that these are folks that just work the system or are being enabled to live this way, this is not true. Most folks that we feed are hard-working people that just dont earn enough to make ends meet. 87% of households polled in the recent hunger study reside in non-temporary housing such as houses or apartments, and on average throughout the Big bend, 35.1% of those determined to be food insecure are not eligible for government assistance due to being just above the poverty threshold. These are working people that cannot feed their families who are very dependent on our food bank network to survive. Actor Jeff Bridges who is a strong advocate for our network and Feeding Americas hungry stated Poverty is a very complicated issue, but feeding a child isnt. I believe that it is a complicated issue, and until our society figures it out we need to make sure our hungry neighbors, friends, and family members are fed. Please share this folks; we really need to reach this goal over the next 6 weeks to provide the food needed to get through the holiday season.
Posted on: Mon, 01 Sep 2014 13:21:40 +0000