United Way of King County is shining a bright light on hunger and we’re asking everyone including teenagers and children to think about their relationship to food.   Who has food, who doesn’t, where does your food come from?

As parents or educators you might be wondering how you can get your children/students involved in Hunger Action Week. Whole families can participate in the Hunger Challenge (eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner, spending only $7 a day—the same amount allotted to a single person on food stamps),…

Today is February 29th, a pretty unusual day, that only comes around once every 4 years… a bonus day! This year we invite you to pledge to donate your extra day by volunteering in your community. You’ll hardly miss it. We promise.

Below are a few suggestions on how you can make the most of your extra 24 hours, but if you’re looking for something different, remember you can always find volunteer opportunities with hundreds of local nonprofits at www.uwkc.org/volunteer. Happy Leap Day!

Volunteer…

On the moss covered hills of the UW campus there lurks a team of covert mercenaries.

This band of ninjas have taken an oath to strengthen their community while pursuing training in arts and sciences. On March 31^st at 6PM they will convene at the University Village Microsoft Store with nonperishable food items in tow to compete in an epic XBOX Kinect Fruit Ninja tournament. The winner will be filled with the joy of victory and immortalized on the walls of Facebook.

United…

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…