Imagine trying to serve meals to the most vulnerable Washingtonians with an all volunteer staff and a kitchen that has long passed time for an upgrade.  The recession has meant that you’ve an increase in need and you and your fellow volunteers are serving 22% more meals than you ever have.  You are projecting a 15% increase in need over the next year and the City of Issaquah has asked your program to become part of the emergency response network.

What are you going to…

I love the “Why the Fork” campaign because it is giving organizations like the Somali Youth and Family Club an opportunity to educate us about the needs of the communities that they serve.

Like this: Do you know how large the gap between SNAP and Basic Food benefits and he price of Halal food is?  It’s big enough that most low-income Muslim families have exhausted their benefits by mid-month.  Compounding this problem is a Food Bank system that does not have the resources to receive…

Growing up, I think Meals on Wheels was the first non-profit I had ever heard of. I was certainly the most memorable for me, and I can’t recall why. Perhaps it they had commercials on Saturday mornings as I watched cartoons at my grandparents house in Spokane WA, or perhaps it was just the catchy name. (I liked, and still do pretty much anything that has wheels.)

Then and now, Meals on Wheels just makes sense to me. Here in King County, they use…

Every year on Capitol Hill, more than 1,400 volunteers give their time to make hot meals for people who are homeless. The program, called Community Lunch served more than 30,000 meals last year.

A “Why the Fork” grant from United Way of King County will allow Community Lunch to hire a volunteer manager to recruit and organize the volunteers, install a new commercial refrigerator, and begin serving dinner three nights per week. Over the course of a year, this will mean 10,000 more meals…

As a 10 year employee of United Way of King County, I’ve been lucky to visit many of the agencies that do incredible work in our community. I’ve had the chance to meet and visit with the people who work very hard every day to help as many people as they can. When I think about the food banks I’ve visited, I recall lines of grateful people, thoughtful volunteers bustling about and stacks and stacks of food.

It takes a lot of work to run…

Our friends at Lifelong AIDS Alliance have ensured that people fighting illness and isolation won’t go hungry for nearly 30 years with the Chicken Soup Brigade.  It’s the only program in the Pacific Northwest that gets nutritional food to our housebound neighbors with life threatening illnesses.  We’re working with them to raise money for a new van!

You can help us go a step further and Dine Out for Life.  On Thursday,…

The Hunger Challenge is coming to a close.  It has been a lively week and a lot of lessons have been learned.  We’ve had discussions, but the Challenge and Hunger Action Week will be a failure if we don’t keep working to end hunger.  Hunger Action Week may be “over,” but the fight isn’t.

Let’s make sure that we take the lessons from the week, bottle the conversations that we had, and spread the word.  Food banks still need volunteers and donors.  Legislators still need…

We’ve wrapped up Hunger Action Week, five days dedicated to raising awareness about hunger in our community.

So now what?

It’s time to take action. There are many ways you can get involved, and we’re sure that you can come up some creative ideas too. Here’s what Mary Shaw, one of our staff members at United Way of King County, said she chose to do.

“I thought I could get involved by doing a virtual hunger awareness lunch. OK, I guess I am not

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Whatever you may have learned during this week (positive and negative), I hope you remember to use this experience to help fight hunger in our community! Here are few tips to keep the fight against hunger top of mind…

Hunger Action Week is in its last day.  It has been a great week.  There are a lot of people taking the Hunger Challenge and writing about it and even more joining the discussion.  The Hunger Challenge has certainly been the most public part of HAW, but there is so much more going on.  People are helping United Way and our partners by donating to support improvements to food banks, additional trucks for meals delivery programs, and bringing the farm to food banks.  It’s exhilarating…