Offer Food When Other Help Is Not Available

What unmet needs are there in your community?

How often are needy families being told that “no help is available” when a more accurate characterization is that the specific thing they have asked for isn’t available, but that significant amounts of food aid are available that could help meet their needs?

Offering food frees up other resources

Suppose a family needs a crib but no donated cribs are in the system. Suppose that in such cases such people were referred to a pantry to draw enough food to free up enough of the family’s food money so they could go buy a crib.

How might that work? Suppose the pantry decided to err on the side of generosity and let the family draw $100 worth of food to make sure they really did end up with enough freed-up money to get a crib and maybe some sheets and blankets to go with it. If the food has been drawn from the area’s food bank or food rescue organization, the cost to the pantry to provide $100 worth of it would be only about $5, and if someone has donated those funds to the pantry, the after-tax cost of providing that family with the wherewithal to get their baby all set up in a very nice crib that they picked out themselves would be about $3.75.

Food helps seniors buy medicine

A series of articles in The Grand Rapids (Mich.) Press profiled senior citizens who had to choose between getting the medicine they need and getting food to eat. I started making the rounds demanding a solution, and within a few months the area’s Senior Meals On Wheels Program opened a food pantry specifically for seniors in the area who needed the extra help.

We couldn’t give those seniors their medicine, but we certainly could do better than letting them go hungry. In 2003, the Senior Meals On Wheels Program’s Senior Food Pantry helped thousands of area seniors with $284,000 worth of food drawn from the food bank for just $20,776.

Charity food can help pay rent

Suppose for example, someone’s hours are cut back and with that reduction they won’t be able to pay the rent. Suppose rent assistance isn’t available. What makes more sense, telling them that no help is available or referring them to a pantry that is willing to begin supplying them with as much of their food as possible in hopes of freeing up enough money so they can pay their rent?

Like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I have a dream. That dream is that one day we will have enough food pantries in America converted over to The Waste Not Want Not methods to not only end hunger, but continue on, offering food into the breach whenever some family’s need will otherwise remain unmet.

I believe that if and when the charity food distribution system reaches its full potential we can not only end hunger, but we can possibly turn the corner on homelessness, utility shut-offs, seniors having to choose between food and medicine, and a host of other problems that people have always thought were too large and expensive for us to deal with.

If we go after them with approaches that are too expensive, then of course we will forever fall short. But if we’ve multiplied our impact and ability by 50 times what it was, then no problem is too big.