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ELP scholars and Ripon Middle School students worked together to raise awareness about hunger AND collect food to help the Ripon Food Pantry. The RMS students collected 729 food items to donate to the Ripon Food Pantry!
Ripon College’s Ethical Leadership Program Food Drive
In Partnership with Ripon Middle School
Facts About Poverty and Hunger in America
- The foods that Ripon’s Community Food Pantry needs the most are:
- Cereals, soups, macaroni, peanut butter and jelly
- Food collected by food drives stays in the community where it is collected so all the food that you collect will go right to families that need it in the Ripon community
- The difference between a food pantry and a food bank is that a food bank receives food from the government and other large organizations. A food pantry however depends completely donations form the community. A food pantry can only give as much food as it has.
- 35.5 million people, or 1 in 10 households in the United States experience hunger or the risk of hunger every year. This number of includes 12.6 million children
- These people often have to skip meals or even go without food for an entire day. And often parents who receive food for a food pantry do not eat themselves so that they can give more food to their children.
- Each year an average of 430 thousand children live in household where they experience hunger every day.
- Research shows that school children who experience severe hunger have more trouble in school.
- Children who do not get enough when they are young may also develop life-long health problems because they do not get enough nutrition
- A survey in 2006 showed that 48 percent of families requesting emergency food from government and community organization where families with children
- The demand on community food pantries like Ripon’s is so great that in 2006 23 percent of the people who came could not be helped.
- Often times these families have to choose between paying for things like their apartment or electricity bills and feeding their children.
- We often think that people who need help from organizations like Ripon’s food pantry are people who are homeless or unemployed, but actually nationally only 12 percent of those people are homeless and 36 percent have at least one person working in their household
- Many elderly people, or people who are no longer able to work depend on emergency food boxes from food pantries because they are no longer able to make an income
- Most food pantries can only provide food as a supplement to the food that the family gets on their own, they cannot provide all the groceries for a family. The amount of food given to a family depends on how much the family makes, but it is usually supposed to last the family 3 to 5 days
- Every little bit helps! And if you cannot donate food you can always donate you time and your labor by volunteering, which is just as important.
Make sure to check all the food you donate, the food pantry cannot except food that is past its expiration date, or food where the packaging as been damaged
Sources
Faith. End Hunger. Web. 01 Nov. 2009. <http://www.bread.org/learn/hunger-basics/hunger-facts-domestic.html>.
"Hunger Quiz." Feeding America. Web. 01 Nov. 2009. <http://feedingamerica.org/faces-of-hunger/hunger-101/quiz.aspx>.
Oregon Food Bank 10 Hunger Facts for Food Drives. Oregon Food Bank. Print. http://www.oregonfoodbank.org/events_and_food_drives/food_drives/documents/fooddrivefacts.pdf
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