Hunger hits close to home
If hunger seems like the last issue anyone you know might face, think again.
One in 10 Minnesotans experiences food insecurity on a regular basis, according to the USDA. That’s 500,000 people right here at home, who don’t know how they might get their next meal.
“It is a problem that’s reaching out into the suburbs,” explained Major Jim Curl of the Maplewood Salvation Army. “It’s the underemployed individual or family who have to decide whether or not they are going to pay rent or buy food.”
He said that even in statistically middle-class suburbs like Maplewood, the need for food is growing. At the food shelf here, they average 180 families a week, up from 160 a week in the summer. “And we’re only open two days a week – we would have even more if we were open more,” Curl added.
Maplewood food shelf visitor Kang Moua comes once a month with her mother, Pang Moua (both pictured, right).
“This is very helpful because finances are tight,” Kang Moua said.
She has a 3-year-old son and says they don’t know how they would make ends meet without the food shelf.
“Oh, we would probably starve,” she continued. “Sometimes we are short on money, so we just can’t buy food.”
That is a very familiar story to the staff and volunteers at this and other Salvation Army food shelves. In the Twin Cities alone, The Salvation Army’s eight food shelves provided groceries to 82,000 people in the last year.
March is Minnesota FoodShare month, a drive organized by the Greater Minneapolis Area Council of Churches. Between now and the end of the month, your donations help support food shelves like ours. A portion of those donations will be matched, making them go even further.
Thanks to our relationships with resources like Second Harvest Food Bank, we can stretch dollars you donate any time of the year. For instance, $1.79 buys someone a hot meal, and just $15 buys a bag of groceries – enough to supply a person three days of meals.
The money you donate stays in your community and can make all the difference to people in need.
“Everybody needs food,” Moua said. “When people donate, it is very, very helpful to the community.”
We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.