Marra Farm Volunteers: Can you dig it?

Looking outside today, there’s no denying that spring is upon us (cheers and applause). I don’t know about you, but I’m itching to get outside and start digging in the dirt, planting my first veggies and soaking up the long awaited sounds and smells of spring. If you feel the same, or if you’re just looking for a way to help end hunger in our community, join us at Lettuce Link’s Marra Farm on April 12^th from 4-6 pm for a couple hours of gardening for the greater good. You’ll get your hands dirty, converse with friends over rows of onion starts, and learn about the history and cultural significance of Marra Farm, as told by the always engaging Farmer Sue. Need more convincing? Check out the photos from last year’s Marra Farm project and read volunteer Charyn Pfeuffer’s take on the experience.

To sign up for the Marra Farm project on April 12^th, click here. Space is limited, so claim your spot early!

What are you going to do?  Issaquah Meals, a program of Catholic Community Services, said “Why the Fork”.

Issaquah Meals has been serving healthy, nutritious dinners to low-income and homeless families on the Eastside since late spring 1989.  The program, started at the request of the City of Issaquah and local churches, began serving meals two nights per week.  Two nights was not enough to meet the need and Issaquah Meals now serves 5 dinners per week.  Run almost completely by volunteers who prepare meals at the homes, IM’s kitchen is in desperate need of renovation.  Despite having very little storage capacity, no dishwasher, and cabinets and drawers that are falling apart, Issaquah Meals is seeking a partnership to expand dinner service to the weekends.

Seven days a week!  Issaquah Meals is already serving more than 700 meals per month, but it’s not enough.  Weekend dinner will allow IM to ensure that our most vulnerable Eastside neighbors have seven nutritious meals.  More meals served means that IM’s clients will be able to stretch their budgets for essentials.  In addition, Issaquah Meals will be able to join the emergency response network for the city.  IM will ensure that the community is prepared for a disaster by storing emergency rations on site.

YOU can help Issaquah Meal and 11 other local hunger relief organizations with a donation at http://whythefork.org. Through April 14, all gifts will be matched dollar-for-dollar. That means that your gift will be doubled!

A kitchen renovation will help Issaquah Meals serve more low-income and homeless families on the Eastside.  So, say Why the Fork and ensure that Issaquah Meals can expand their outreach and services!

Please click here now to stick a fork in hunger! Give today, and tomorrow more people will eat. Thank you for helping end hunger in our community.

Then and now, Meals on Wheels just makes sense to me. Here in King County, they use volunteers to deliver healthy, nutritious meals to more than 2,000 low-income seniors. This allows them to go on living independently in their own home for as long as they can.

A ‘Why the Fork’ grant from United Way of King County will allow Meals on Wheels to replace the aging freezers they use to stage thousands of meals that are delivered every week. Just one freezer failure can cause the loss of more than $7,000 worth of food, which happened back in 2009.

Please consider a gift to help Meals on Wheels and our other Why the Fork grantees, you can click here to give. Don’t forget, every donation through April 14th will be doubled thanks to a generous matching gift!

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 for people in the neighborhood.

As someone helped by Community Lunch, Jessica observed “My daughter and I became homeless because of an abusive relationship. Here we can come and get a hot meal, and eat in a safe environment. The volunteers are great, and it’s so much more than just a sandwich and milk!”

Please click here now to make a gift today and your gift will be doubled by our generous matching donors!

Thank you for helping end hunger in our community.

It takes a lot of work to run a food bank; managing deliveries, tracking inventory, stocking the shelves, registering and greeting the clients and much more. Much of the work is difficult and time consuming. However, many of these labor intensive tasks can be streamlined by a simple technology upgrade called ‘Client Card”.

United Way of King County’s “Why the Fork” grant will allow six food banks in South King County region to upgrade their computer hardware and software and begin to use the Client Card system.

Executive Director of the Auburn Food Bank, Debbie Christian told us they doubled their intake of clients when they started using Client Card, cutting client registration down from four minutes to less than one.

In the past year the six food banks who will benefit from the Why the Fork grant have served a total of 6.5 million pounds of food to 48,000 individuals.

YOU can help South King County Food Banks serve even more families with a donation at http://whythefork.orgThrough April 14, all gifts will be matched dollar-for-dollar.

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 the queen of Facebook either. Only a few of my FB friends RSVP’d for my lunch.

It was a lot of fun anyway, with enough folks for a small party and, like most parties, people kept showing up throughout the event! Some of them gave from their own pockets as well. When lunch time came, I sent them all some info about the work they are supporting by participating in my lunch, and let them know how they could ‘leave a tip.’ I felt like I was having a party with my friends even though we were all at our respective desks at work.

I guess not everyone is quite in tune with what ‘virtual events’ are and didn’t know exactly what was expected so they didn’t RSVP. Or maybe they are familiar with my budget and didn’t want to force me to give! (Probably not.) Next time I will try to provide a better explanation of what the event is all about and see if I get a better turnout. It was a great idea and I had fun with it. It raised a few bucks and hopefully more awareness.”

On our Facebook page, Marilyn Dauer talked about how the Hunger Challenge and Hunger Action Week have inspired her to do more.

“For me it created a new way of looking at purchasing food, nutrition, food costs, etc. I have gained a new awareness of food issues in the community. I will be helping with a food drive this weekend to gather food for our local food bank. I am also now volunteering weekly at Annie’s Kitchen which is a free dinner offered to anyone in the community every Wednesday. So, Hunger Action Week has made a good impact on my life.”

Here are 8 ways you can help end hunger in King County:

1. Contact your legislators and let them know that hunger relief programs like State Food Assistance are important to our community. 
2. Invite friends to a “virtual lunch.” Estimate the cost and donate that amount to your favorite hunger-relief organization.
3. Plan a food drive with your school, neighborhood, place of worship or afterschool group.
4. Set up a volunteer project that help ends hunger in our community.
5. Energize your book group around a book that focuses on the issues of hunger such as “Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty” by Mark Winne or “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan.
6. Donate the free items from “buy one, get one free” grocery store campaigns.
7. Grow a vegetable garden with your family and donate extra vegetables to a food bank.
8. Give a gift to United Way of King County to support food banks, meal delivery programs and urban farming projects. Through April 14, every dollar you give will be matched so that means your donation will be doubled!

If each of us commits to speak up, act, volunteer, and support organizations working to reduce hunger in our community, we will succeed.

That’s not all. Hunger Action Weekers are also donating their time at food banks, signing up to volunteer at Marra Farm, and organizing food drives.

On Saturday the Emergency Feeding Program of South Seattle & King County held a food drive at Sam’s Club in Renton.  Volunteers from Boeing’s Black Employees Association staffed the drive.  Said Brian Anderson, of the Emergency Feeding Program, “It was not only successful, but inspiring and a lot of fun.”  It was a successful event and shoppers were very generous in their donations.  The volunteers had a great time – “The opportunity to give back to the community and interact with community members while networking in between the goal was a fulfilling and satisfying experience.”  Many people had recently giving to relief efforts in Japan, but still donated one or two food items.  As one donor said, “we have our problems here but we must not take the good things for granted, look at what is happening in Japan.  I’ll do anything to help.”  In the end, the volunteers had fun, collected a lot of food, and raised awareness about hunger in our community.  “Being a Boeing employee, giving three hours of my time was gratifying, what a small price to pay for the reward and benefit others who are not as fortunate.”

The team at Windows Admin Volunteer Events is hosting a food drive for thousands of employees at Microsoft.  The food will be donated to our partners at Hopelink.  As Nanci from WAVE said, “Over the last couple months we have been talking about how around the holidays food banks tend to get more donations than other times of the year so we wanted to have a food drive now to encourage giving back and keep the spirit going. I read about the United Way’s Hunger Action Week and thought this would be a great opportunity to raise awareness and collect donations”

Thanks to the teams from Boeing’s Black Employees Association and WAVE many people were able to join Hunger Action Week by donating food to two very important programs.  More importantly, the Emergency Feeding Program of South Seattle & King County and Hopelink have been able to add to the shelves of their food bank.  It’s important to remember, while Hunger Action Week may be coming to a close, we haven’t ended hunger yet.  Food banks will still need volunteers and donations.  Join us!  To find out how you can help visit this page.

I’m no expert on Washington’s Basic Food Program (what we call food stamps in this state), but Liz Jaquette at the nonprofit WithinReach is. So I gave Liz a call and got a brief, but illuminating, education on food stamps. Here’s what I learned.

$7 a day is the MAXIMUM benefit for a single person
Most single people on food stamps don’t get $7 a day. They get far less.

To qualify for food stamps, as a household of one, you need to make no more than $1,816 a month. If that seems like a lot for one month, keep in mind that equals an annual income of $21,792 (before taxes). Pretty meager.

At $1,816, a single person may likely receive as little as $16 in food stamps for an entire month, which comes out to about 52 cents a day.

To qualify for $7 a day in food stamps, you would have to be very low-income—as in $700 in monthly income. This means someone who is surviving on $8,000—or less—a year.

We wanted to make the Hunger Challenge a low barrier exercise for people so that’s why we set the allotment at the maximum benefit. We know that this doesn’t reflect the reality of most single people on food stamps, but the point of the Hunger Challenge isn’t to perfectly replicate the conditions of being poor and hungry. We want people to get a glimpse of what it’s like, and then be motivated to take action to help end hunger.

Each person in your household doesn’t get $7 a day for food stamps
For each additional person in a household, the calculation for food stamps benefit is less.

For example, if you have a two-person household, the maximum daily benefit you can get is $12, not $14.

The basis for food stamp allotments is the Thrifty Food Plan, put together by the United States Department of Agriculture. It dictates how much the feds think a family can get by on a month.

The federal government assumes that people share food within a household and so more people in your household does not always equal more money in food stamps. In other words, big families don’t get huge benefit amounts.

Every state’s food stamp program is different
Liz said that Washington is one of the few states that require people to be 200% below the federal poverty level to qualify for food stamps. In other states, you have to be “seriously, seriously” low-income to get them.

In addition, Liz said that other states want people to go through all of their resources before they apply for benefits. That means people are completely exhausting their savings, selling their assets and completely broke by the time they try to get food stamps.

That isn’t the case in Washington, which gives people a better chance of stabilizing. However, it hasn’t always been this way, and it definitely could change.

Resources
Obviously food stamps and public benefits in general are very complicated. If you want to learn more about the Washington Basic Food program, a good place to start is its website: http://foodhelp.wa.gov/basic_food.htm.

Another interesting tool is the Basic Food Benefit Estimator. This gives you a sense of what your food stamps benefit would be based on your household size, income and other factors.

You can also call the Family Health Hotline at 1.800.322.2588 to ask questions about food stamps and other benefits.

And Liz Jaquette of WithinReach has generously agreed to personally take questions at lizj@withinreachwa.org.

The United Way created the platform, but it has been the readers, participants, and critics who have pushed the discussion in unexpected directions.  What we have to ensure happens from here on out is that we keep the momentum going and move forward.  Can’t wait to see the final thoughts tomorrow.

In the meantime, check out Meal Gap Data(13.4% of King County Residents are food insecure), consider a donation of your time or money to local efforts to fight hunger, and check out the posts from participants.

The updates:

Marisa Miller, one of the Hunger Challenges most ardent critics, explains why the Challenge has made her angry.

Martha Kang touches on the Hunger Challenge conversation, explains why she is participating, and hopes we can return the focus back to hunger.

Helen of Vegtastic wonders if you can’t cook or don’t have the facilities, can you find healthy and budget friendly packaged food.

Andrea Mitchell of Can You Stay for Dinner and Foodista writes about what she has learned about the value she places on food.

Cook Local is back with a recipe for Chana Dal with Fennel and Almonds.  Mr. Cook Local also includes a nice tip about utilizing the cook books available at the library.

Diana Johnson from Diansaur Dishes is cooking for four, including two rather hungry teenagers.  She gives us a recipe for 90 potstickers.  The cost: under $6.50.  She also includes links to tips on eating healthy on a budget.

Tracy Taylor wants to wrap her head around hunger and raise awareness.  That’s why she is participating this week.

Annabelle and C.J. from Magnolia Prep are still counting their change to budget their food.  C.J. wondered why strawberries were more expensive than his Pop Tarts.

Steve and Lee from KZOK update us on day three. Steve stressed the importance of paying attention at the grocery store.

Back in the Box and family had leftover stew, prepared by their relief pitcher “Gramma”. He also finds some interesting information about how the U.S. stacks up to the rest of the world when it comes to hunger.

I always throw my peels out, but Sheri Wetherell from Foodista says don’t.  Peels can be frozen and used in soup stock later.  Sheri also continues her plan to cook meals with food commonly found at a food bank.  Breakfast today? Spam and egg hash.

Hsiao-Ching Chou made a delicious looking dinner and came in $8 under budget for the day.

Tracy Schneider does some food budget math for us and notes that lack of planning can blow large and small budgets.

Clay Holtzman made enough dinner for five servings and has a little less than $9 left.

Janice Harper of Foodista urges us not to forget that world hunger is a serious issue as well.