Essay on Houston Food Bank

On Tuesday evening, over fifty of our leaders from Auto, Innovation, and Recovery came to fight hunger and feed hope at the San Antonio Food Bank. Collectively they sorted through 20,330 pounds of food which resulted in 16,264 meals for the city of San Antonio and it's surrounding counties. It was an evening of camaraderie and fun that will never be forgotten.

In conclusion, hunger in America is at an all time high due to poverty and the economy. The increasingly high number of starving children has gone up over the past years and needs to be stopped. There are government programs set up to help stop hunger in American, such as, SNAP Food Stamps and WIC. We can get involved by volunteering with Feeding America or other non-for-profit organizations set for feeding the hungry. Food donations and monetary donations have always been a great way to help out for those who don’t have the time to donate.

According to the survey conducted by the U.S conference of Mayors, 67% of adults requesting emergency food aids are people with jobs. Recently, American food banks are experiencing a “torrent of need which they cannot meet”. In Maine, Ms Ehrenreich needed immediate food aid or cash assistance as she was new to the place and most of

In the face of a weak economy, America’s cultural communities are proving to be resilient. Enduring through these difficult times takes courage and commitment; our diverse communities are an excellent reflection of people creating change in the world. As economic conditions continue to worsen, our communities have taken the opportunity to improve their conditions together. Right here in Sacramento we are privileged to have the strength and support of the SFBSF (Sacramento Food Bank & Family Services). Sacramento Food Bank & Family Services has been actively helping the needy in Sacramento communities since 1976, when it was founded by Father Madigan. This report will focus on the details, history, and potential of the Sacramento Food Bank

When I was volunteering in the food bank, there were very few new faces, and the most of them were our “regular customers.” They would show up seven days a week, come by car and fetch the whole family’s ration, or all the family members would come to take their ration. It hard to imagine that an entire family has to live such miserable life in such a long period of time. While I am grateful to those benefactors and Samaritans for assuring the food banks had adequate food storage and donations, I realized that this is not a permanent solution for poverty, as evidenced by the same group of people repeatedly showing up every week. As a charity, food banks are not meant to eradicate poverty; instead, they should be considered as a complimentary social service aid the most, which most people neglect to remember.

Inter-Faith Food Shuttle (IFFS) is a $14.5 million nonprofit that uses a holistic approach to address and end hunger in the Research Triangle Region of North Carolina. IFFS believes that hunger is an issue that can be solved by, “creating sources of healthy food in every low-income neighborhood and grow opportunities for people to provide for themselves by learning job skills or growing their own food.” The pillars of this approach are feeding, teaching, and growing. (IFFS, 2016)

Unfortunately not all organizations see the world in a humanitarian point of view, but the handful that do includes The South Texas Food Bank. This organization was founded in 1989 and has been helping the community of Laredo ever since. The South Texas Food Bank allows the unfortunate to receive food and also educate the community about the realities of hunger. It has helped more than ten thousand families throughout the years.

Food banks provide prevailing economic need as a distribution outlet for the federal government (USDA), and national local food sources. Food banks serve and help create an infrastructure of member’s agencies, food panties that provide food directly to food insecure seniors and other food insecure populations, soup kitchens and relief organizations. Food banks networks provide food support for over 37 million Americans yearly including 14 million children and over 3 million older adults. As of 2015 there were over 15, 000 food pantries throughout the United States. The majority of seniors that use food banks receive some social assistance, over 41% lived alone, and over 22% of food bank recipients in food insecure senior households had sought help from food banks, soup kitchens, or other charitable agencies to feed themselves in the past year (AARP, 2014, p. 29-30).

Growing up in poverty as a child we would always look for free resources throughout our community to assist us with clothing, food and low income programs such as housing. One of the main resources we found really valuable was a food bank community center located in our city of Pittsburg, CA. We will go every other week to stack up on foods like produce, diary, can foods and frozen meats. Sometimes when we didn't have enough food to eat during the week we would head over to the Emergency Food Bank provided free meals. I am glad that we live in a society were communities can work among each other to help the people in need. This why I have chosen this specific topic to write my paper on due to the past childhood experiences i've had.

The experiences that have prepared me to serve the underserved population includes community service, volunteer hours, and working with the population that is medically underserved. My experience within the community includes distributing food from my church food bank to the residents within the community. The food giveaway takes place bi-weekly on Saturday from 12 pm to 4 pm. This service prepares me to work with the medically underserved population and low income families. Many of the people that come to obtain food from the food bank live in a multi-family household that can’t afford to provide enough food for everyone. Thus, creating a financial burden, making it difficult to provide or meet the physiologic essentials

I have lived a rather sheltered life. My family has never really had any struggles or hardships. I have never had to worry about when and where my next meal will be, or when I will be able to sleep comfortably again, and until recently I took that for granted. Last winter, I went and volunteered at The Greater Boston Food Bank with the varsity hockey team for my school. I had never done any volunteer work of this nature before, and I was interested about what happened at larger food banks like this one. We worked to separate the donated meat packages into different boxes based on what type of meat they were. We also had to discard any food that was not safe to eat. I did not meet anyone who actually needed the food, but seeing the condition some it was in opened my eyes.

The founders of the MSU Food Bank are prime examples of people that put the practice of “Model the way” into action. These dedicated individuals consisted of students and factuality. Each and every one of the founders led by example each and every day, and still do today. If these people did not put in the countless hours that they did, the MSU Food Bank would be non existent. The hundreds of people that they supply every year would go hungry, the people that go to the MSU Food Bank would not be able to perform at the level they do today because they would be food deprived. The founds of MSU’s Food Bank laid the foundation and set a bar in our community, these individuals had a goal and took the initiation to put it in motion, and forever changed

To accomplish the creation of this pamphlet, we broke the collaboration up into four tasks:

Most charities or donation opportunities arise because there is a problem in society that people feel like they need to fix. One example of a problem, which lead to a donation opportunity is that “one in six Americans face the problem of hunger (Dosomething.org).” This is in the process of being solved by food banks, soup kitchens, pantries, and canned food drives. A food bank does the job of

The volunteers at the Oregon Food Bank are the backbone of this organization, without them production will come to a standstill or cease to exist. Whether they volunteer because of