But students need dorms and they need student centers. Students aren’t going to be very successful if they don’t have a place to stay - and the ones living off campus need shelter for between classes.
Some people choose to support food shelves with their charitable dollars - some people public libraries - some people pet rescue agencies - some people art museums - and that is the thing with charity - its volunteer. Its the ultimate “you get to decide what is worth supporting with your money.” I can decide to donate half a million dollars to the local art museum if that is what I value - and I can decide to do that - and value that - even if people are going hungry in my own community. If this weren’t the case, we’d solve the problem with taxes.
If 500 more rich or scholarship-winning kids get to go to Harvard, that means there’s room for 500 more at State, and thus 500 more at the local community college.
I just send a very nice donation off to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which supports sutainable fisheries which means there may be food for us all come 2 score years from now.
Food banks are a band-aid, Education and environmental groups are an investment.
It’s a subject for another thread, but I think there’s a growing need for colleges that offer a great education, but bare-bones amenities. I work at a private college. Most of our students aren’t struggling. I’d much prefer to see the money that our Development Office raises go to help students in financial need rather than refurbish the athletic center or build a new student union.
People absolutely have the right to donate to whatever charity they choose. If it makes them happy to donate to a university, that’s great. I’m not saying that folks shouldn’t do it. But in terms of providing concrete help to people who need it right away, I think food banks are a much better choice than private universities.
As part of a solution to the current problems, I wonder if people could be convinced to donate money rather than goods?
Presumably, there are people who are donating, just not enough. Maybe if some of those donations could be shifted to cash, it would help. I see barrels of food at the grocery store for donations, and there’s currently one in the lobby of my office building, too. But I also know that my buying a can of tuna at the grocery store is just about the least efficient way of donating food to the hungry. I’d much better off giving the food bank a dollar and letting them pool it with others to buy a whole flat of something at a much better than retail price, and save paying the guy who has to drive around to pick up the canned food in those barrels, too.
Maybe some advertising to get people to rethink their donation and make one of money rather than canned goods would help.
However, the point is that a lot of dudes will buy a six-pack of tuna on sale and only need 3 cans, or they have a bunch of older but still good canned goods at home , which they donate.
I agree with this but maybe for different reasons than you think. Food stamps seem to be used pretty often on a lot of junk food. I would also wager that a lot of the poorer folk who use them also have a lot of problems with obesity and other problems that come with eating cheap garbage. These are probably also a lot of the people that the government is also paying or certainly will be paying for in terms of healthcare.
Also, people who are dependent on the government for food have no business complaining when the government tries to teach them how to cook more cheaply and healthily. McDonald’s may be cheap for one person, but you can also buy a pork roast or a chicken and feed a whole family for 8 dollars plus sides. I bought a gigantic chicken the other day for like 7 dollars and it was HUGE.
Again, I believe that the government has every right to dictate that food stamps not be used to buy garbage. Maybe we could raise the allowance while knowing that the better food costs more? I don’t think that poor familes on food stamps don’t want to eat meat more often, I just think they can’t afford to.
Getting back on track with the OP, I think the main problem is one of communication. I think there will certainly be resources (within the more well-off of the community) to make up for the short-fall. There is clearly a shortfall and there is a greater amount of people looking for food, right? I think if the people with the resources were to realize that if they don’t act there will be people starving, then they would act, so the job is to make that point to the appropriate people.
The WIC program controls what can be purchased, but it’s a short list. There is no desire within the government to micro-manage everything that goes into a person’s mouth, nor is there a need. If they provide nutritional education and MORE MONEY, people might eat better. However, as it stands, you have to purchase cheap food if you want that allotment to last. Cheap food is generally not good for you…or at least not as good as fresh, labor-intensive meals.
Well, I was just arguing that it might be worth-while and maybe even cost-effective in the long-run to allot more money on the condition that it go towards better food. There’s myriad health benefits from eating better, not to mention psychological benefits too. But yes, if you have to stretch your budget really far, you will probably end up getting food that is worse for you. Personally I think it might be worth it to instill better habits in the long run. Of course I also think it’s a tragedy that we don’t teach our children basic skills like this in compulsory schools. I think teaching kids and young adults some basics of cooking would be a godsend.
In an ideal world buying items to make meals from scratch makes a lot of sense… BUT it requires you have a means to cook the food. One of my internet acquaintances lost his home about three months ago. He and his father have obtained “housing” in a hotel with the help of charity subsidizing some of the cost, however, all they have for “cooking” is a coffee maker and a microwave. Food stamps are a major part of their food budget. It’s all very well to say they should bake their own bread and cook beans from scratch and make stews - but they don’t have an oven or stove. So, yeah, they buy whatever microwave stuff is on sale, and bags of frozen vegees, and potatoes, but they simply don’t have the means to do a lot cooking from scratch.
As another example, a lot of people in my neighborhood lost homes to either the August tornado or the September floods we had. They, too, are on food stamps. Many of them don’t have access to a full kitchen because temporary and emergency housing often sucks in that manner.
So while it’s all very well to dream of industrious poor people making home-cooked meals it’s actually not realistic in all cases. That’s probably why there’s considerably more flexibility in food choices than many people think there should be. Not all poor people even have a real home, much less a real real kitchen. Those in the most desperate circumstances and thus most in need can very well be those least able to actually cook food from scratch.
Throw a party where admission requires a donation of food, and then the various events cost money from vendors, like food and games. Give a portion of all proceeds to the food bank. That way you’ll get both food donations and make some money.
I would not have brought this up, but this seems to have turned into a “poor people on food stamps” issue rather than “food pantries” issue. So I will mention a website: www.angelfoodministries.com
I am in no way associated with this program, except that I make use of it to stretch my (large) family’s monthly food budget.
The “basic” box from Angel Food is designed to basically be a week’s worth of food for a family of four. The food is generally easy-to-prepare, and reasonably nutritious. The program is all over the USA.
In addition, if you buy the “basic” box (or more than one; I normally order two), you can buy the “specials”.
Basically, since I found Angel Food, I’ve stopped buying meats at the supermarket. This is huge in terms of our food budget (two adults-as in parents- one grown child (21YO), her bf (19YO), a 17YO and an 8YO)
Angel Food accepts cash, money orders or food stamps.
I think the 37,000 figure you found “oniline” may have been exagerated just a bit. From your link in this post, the population of McHenry county was 312,373, while the % of people living below the povery line was 4.5% (both figures as of 2006). That would be roughly 14,000 people below the poverty line. It seems unlikely then that 37,000 people would need to use a food bank.
So you’re using this program to stretch your family’s food budget? A week or so ago you told us all that you spend a couple of hundred dollars a month on booze.
I mean, if you can spend that much money on booze in a month, isn’t it a little like taking the Angel Food’s resources away from people who use it because they actually don’t have any extra money for non-essentials like booze, let alone a couple of hundred dollars a month?
Stop looking for 5 year old cans of creamed corn and go after the money. Find a pottery/artist group who will donate their talents and design a series of mugs with a food theme but don’t make it retardly obvious that it’s for charity. Give them away with every $50 donation and get people to collect the damn things. Buy the food wholesale and sell it at a greatly reduced cost as a way to further leverage the donations.
How heavy is the religious propaganda that comes with it? Is it just a single Bible tract or a note identifying the church, or would I be assaulted by hordes of missionaries insisting I and my husband haul ourselves out of bed multiple times per week to go to their church? This may sound petty, but the last time I was depending on food pantries to eat regularly it was a really big problem, to the extent some churches wouldn’t help you unless you became a member of their church, attended services, had their people trooping through your home, and generally being intrusive bastards. Others, of course, didn’t care, they really did just want to help out folks in trouble and they were very, very cool people.
I guess I just don’t want my misfortune to become someone else’s “Jesus points”, I’m a human being, not a feather in someone’s cap. There’ s also the fact that I’m very happy with my current faith and have no desire to become a Christian at this point in my life.
If I recall, you can make up to 120% of the poverty line income and still qualify for food stamps - are you assuming that you must be under “poverty line” to need food assistance? Because you don’t - you can be over that line and still need help.