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Ways to End Hunger |
Reduce the Cost of Ending Hunger Up to 25%<< previous page
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Let’s assume your church is in a community of 3,500 people that has a poverty rate of about 11 percent, which is approximately the national average. From those numbers the Waste Not Want Not research would project a likely annual food assistance need in the community of just over 90,000 pounds.
Suppose people in your church faithfully bring in cans of food for its own or another church’s pantry to help meet that need. And let’s assume they bring in an average of 300 16-ounce cans per week. That would meet 15,600 pounds, or about 17.3 percent of the need, at a total cost of $10,764 per year— assuming a 69-cents per can cost—to those giving those cans. To meet 100 percent of the need that way, these faithful givers need to be coaxed into spending $51,336 more per year than they are now.
Suppose that you try to get them to give money instead so that the pantry can get its food from your area’s food bank, but that so many people are put off by the change that a third stop giving altogether, a third give only half as much as they used to, and only a third continue giving at the old rate. Total giving would decline to $5,382.
But because you use that money to purchase food from a food bank, and the donated money is easily documented for tax deduction purposes, everyone comes out significantly ahead:
- Donors would likely be able to deduct at least $1,076 of that on their taxes, so the real cost to donors would shrink to about $4,306.
- With $5,382 the pantry can acquire about 53,820 pounds of food from the food bank, meeting nearly 60 percent of the area’s estimated need. This increases your effectiveness by more than three times over relying on food drives.
If, over time, more people can be coaxed into giving money instead of cans, the entire need could be met for approximately $9,000 per year, with donors being able to get about $1,800 of that back on their taxes, for a total bottom-line cost of meeting the area’s total estimated food assistance need of just $7,200, which is 30 percent less than what they used to spend on canned goods in meeting only a fifth of the need!