Estimate Your Community’s Charity Food Needs

To know the impact of your efforts you need to measure your results. Are you meeting 10 percent of the need or 85 percent? The only way to know is to determine what 100 percent of the problem equals, which in this case means:

Calculate the number of pounds of food aid needed per year.

This simple formula should predict within a few percentage points the number of pounds of food aid per year required to reach your area’s needy families.

Multiply the number of people in the area who have incomes at or below the poverty level times 234 pounds.

Number of people in poverty X 234 pounds of food = the amount of annual food aid needed in your community

The two simplest ways to estimate the number of people in poverty in your community are to: