Living on $4 a Day

Providing More Food For Families

July 1, 2010 By Maria Stokes Leave a Comment

50% of all food distributed by Second Harvest Food Bank is perishable and includes a large amount of produce

United Way of the Bay Area recently awarded Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties a $28,000 grant to provide infrastructure and capacity upgrades for their partner emergency food pantries. As opposed to a soup kitchen, an emergency food pantry is a program which provides non-perishable and perishable food to families and individuals to take home and prepare.

Because 50% of all food distributed by Second Harvest Food Bank is perishable and includes a large amount of produce, local pantries have a need for additional cold storage capacity and shelving.

“With this grant we will purchase and deliver refrigerators, freezers and shelving to 12 of our partner food pantries, thereby increasing their efficiency and effectiveness in storing and distributing food,” said Tami Cardenas, Director of Development for Second Harvest Food Bank. “In this way we will help strengthen the food safety net in San Mateo County.”

Immediate and long-term outcomes of this grant include: increasing the number of people served by these 12 pantries by an average of 5%, to 10,874 people annually; and increasing the amount of produce and perishable food available at these 12 pantries by an average of 10%, to 159,322 pounds annually.

“We are grateful to United Way for their support,” said Cardenas. “We rely on our pipeline of partner agencies to help us distribute food to people in need in our community.”

Second Harvest Food Bank is the primary source of donated, surplus, and purchased food for nonprofit agencies in Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties. Food pantries partners receive an average of 83% of the food they distribute to clients from Second Harvest. The Food Bank is committed to providing ongoing infrastructure and capacity support to the Emergency Food Network in order to efficiently alleviate local hunger.

(photo via flickr user storem)

Filed Under: Income, United Way Partners Tagged With: Food Bank, giving, grants, hunger, Income, San Mateo County, United Way Partners

More Americans Than Ever Are Going Hungry

November 18, 2009 By Olu Johnson 1 Comment

A line forms at a San Francisco food pantry

The number of Americans lacking consistent access to food is at the highest level since government records began. This represents an increase of 13 million people from last year. More than 49 million Americans are in households struggling with what the report calls ‘food insecurity.’ Those with very high food insecurity – which amounted to a third of the total number – were households that either did not have enough money food; or forced members of the household to skip meals, cut portions or otherwise go without food at some point in the year. According to the USDA press release:

The other two-thirds generally had enough to eat, but only by eating cheaper or less varied foods and by relying on government aid like food stamps, or visiting food banks and/or soup kitchens. According to the report released by the Department of Agriculture:

Of the 49.1 million people living in food insecure households (up from 36.2 million in 2007), 32.4 million are adults (14.4 percent of all adults) and 16.7 million are children (22.5 percent of all children).

17.3 million people lived in households that were considered to have “very low food security,” a USDA term (previously denominated “food insecure with hunger”). That means one or more people in the household were hungry over the course of the year because of the inability to afford enough food. This was up from 11.9 million in 2007 and 8.5 million in 2000.

Very low food security had been getting worse even before the recession. The number of people in this category in 2008 is more than double the number in 2000.

Black (25.7 percent) and Hispanic (26.9 percent) households experienced food insecurity at far higher rates than the national average.

In California as a whole, 16% of the population had low or very low food insecurity – a situation that is most likely being compounded by the state’s continued rising unemployment.

In the Bay Area, the situation is no less grim. According to United Way’s Laura Escobar, who directs our Emergency Food and Shelter Program, “Here in the Bay Area, as an increasing number of families have turned to food banks and pantries, it has become harder to meet the demand.”

“Most food banks and pantries are reporting an average of 40% increase in demand for their programs since January 2009. Families who are new to the programs and have never asked for assistance are coming in at an unprecedented rate,” she said.

If you would like to help, make a food or monetary donation to your local food bank, start a food drive, or volunteer at pantry or soup kitchen. Every bit helps.

Living on $4 a Day

October 2, 2009 By Olu Johnson Leave a Comment

How well would you survive if your entire meal budget was just $4 a day? As part of the San Francisco Food Bank’s Hunger Challenge, for seven days, several notable Bay Area journalists, and bloggers tried to see how well they could manage on the budget of a food stamp recipient.

According to the Food Bank, more than 150,00 people in San Francisco suffer from food insecurity – not knowing from where (or if) their next meal is coming. A longtime partner of United Way, the Food Bank provides food to more than 22,000 families and distributes more than 35 million meals each week.

Doing that takes a lot of volunteers. Recently as part of our 19th annual Week of Caring, we organized more than 400 volunteers who helped pack, sort and distribute tons of food for needy families.

To find out more about how hunger in San Francisco, and what you can do to help visit the San Francisco Food Bank.

Brooke Minters a blogger with Mission Local took the Hunger Challenge. Her struggles seem to be the ones the average person would face having to radically alter your lifestyle

Tuesday: scrambled egg sandwich (breakfast), spaghetti (lunch), fruit (dinner). It takes a lot of planning to stay within a budget. Even though I woke up early to make breakfast and pack my lunch, I failed to plan for dinner. It was also my mother’s birthday, so I wasn’t able to take her out or even to enjoy dinner with her. With no money for food, life had become increasingly limited. I ate a couple of fruit skewers from my mother’s fruit sculpture birthday gift. Was this breaking the rules? I decide people on food stamps do have jobs, and they do have friends and family who share food. Nonetheless, I still went to bed hungry.

You can read more about her attempts to live on that tight budget here.