Orange County is not as well-off as you think
As we entered our local grocery store last weekend, volunteers handed us a flier for a food drive to help children and families in Orange County. In September, 780 families came to the South County Outreach food pantry for assistance, the highest month ever.
According to a homeless assessment, there were approximately 34,000 homeless people in Orange County in 2005. The numbers have certainly increased in the last couple of years’¦ this number likely doesn’t account for the hidden homeless here (the 1,000 families estimated to be living in motels in Orange County) as reported by The New York Times earlier this year.
The flier listed items needed (e.g. peanut butter, jelly, canned fruit and vegetables, cereal, tomato sauce and pasta, and canned meats and beans) and a bag with the hope that we would purchase food and add it to the shopping carts outside the store.
Once inside the store, we bought several items and donated them on our way out. I liked this approach by the volunteers for a couple of reasons:
1. They weren’t asking for money. In my opinion, with charity trust is always under scrutiny. I don’t like giving money when I don’t really know the organization.
2. They made the donation process easy by asking us to add a few items to our shopping list. Obviously, cash is the most useful donation to any food bank (so they can buy in bulk), but this was a way to take spontaneous action.
Some of you might be thinking, jeez, is this the first time I’ve ever been approached by food bank volunteers. Well, yes. We don’t attend church and I work from home, so my opportunity to be ‘œin’ the community is pretty limited. I haven’t been asked to give to a food bank in a very long time.
What are your views on food banks? Is there a better way to convert the donated food and volunteer hours into a more direct link between hungry people and food? What if people donated gift cards instead that could be redeemed at the local supermarket? Or would I have been compelled to give more if I could have just grabbed a preselected bag of canned foods at checkout? Feel free to comment below.
Photo credit: stock.xchng.
I donate money regularly to our local food bank as well as others. If a friend or family member who lives in a different community has a birthday or anniversary, I give to the food bank in their city. To me the food bank is probably the most deserving recipient of my charity dollars.
I also donate cans of food when I get the bag from the postal workers or boy scouts or high school students or attend a party.
At our grocery store you can drop off cans as you shop in a barrell by the front door year-round. You can also just grab a little slip that lets you add $1, $2, $3 to your grocery bill and donate it to charity. Alas, sometimes that is the food bank and sometimes it is something else and you can’t specify differently.
Ack! ALWAYS GIVE MONEY instead of canned goods. Why? Well, through cooperative bulk-purchase agreements, the Food Bank can purchase about 8 times as much food as you can purchase for $1.
And, cash enables the food bank to do something with all the canned goods they receive before they expire. They need to store and distribute that food, manage volunteers, and pay the utilities bill!
Cash also allows the food bank to supplement all those kidney beans and macaroni with important foods that rarely get contributed: fresh dairy and vegetables, ethnically specific items, and food for people with special dietary needs.
Giving food always feels good and it’s certainly easier to do at the store (you’re right to eschew giving cash without getting a receipt.) But giving money goes so much farther – go straight home and put that check in the mail!
A couple more tidbits I forgot, but don’t want to omit because supporting food banks is more important than ever in an economic crisis:
1. EVALUATE BEFORE YOU GIVE. There are numerous public sources to help you decide if a nonprofit organization is effective. Charity Navigator and Guide Star are two of them – but they only evaluate based on “efficiency,” which is an incomplete picture of nonprofit operations, especially young and small organizations. Read annual reports and search for news coverage. You should look for data-driven strategy and evidence of real, lasting change in the community, not just feel-good stories. It’s easy for local nonprofits to become “dependent on dependency.”
2. ADVOCATE FOR THE HUNGRY. Policy is always more powerful than charity. The most urgent thing you can do is tell your Representative in Congress to support the Child Nutrition Reauthorization. Get more information at http://www.hungeractioncenter.org.
Hi Nina – good post. Having spent a good chunk of my childhood on food stamps and doing all of our “grocery shopping” at the food bank, I agree with Debra that it’s an important charity. This year we’re growing lots of stuff in our garden, and I plan to donate the excess veggies to the food bank.
Emerson makes a good point about giving money, but we don’t have extra money in our budget, so we’ll be donating what we can from the garden. The shopping market collection certainly makes the donation process painless.
Nina, I did have to smile at the idea that you haven’t been asked to donate to the food bank in a very long time. For my family, between church and school and Scouts, we get asked multiple times per year to round up canned goods and send them in. I usually use that as an opportunity to weed out whatever stray items are in our cupboards that are unlikely to get used. (For example, we bought 3 cans of soup on sale that looked tasty, we decided we didn’t like the taste, and still have 2 cans left.) Since we get hit up for donations so often, none of it is expired food, and it’s no money out of our budget to send it in.
To Emerson’s point about cash vs food, I think some of it depends on how the food bank operates. The small-town soup kitchen I volunteer at also provides bags of groceries for its clients. Most of the items in the bags are food bought through a cooperative with the big city food bank, with the bulk-buying approach Emerson mentions. But the city food bank doesn’t provide non-food things like basic toiletries, and the local soup kitchen doesn’t have any bulk-buying opportunities for that. So if I buy packs of discontinued soap or buy-1-get-1-free toothbrushes and donate them to the soup kitchen, that really is the most cost-effective way for the organization to be able to provide those to its clients.
Debra: Until I wrote this post, I never really thought twice about the need for food banks. Good thing there are people like you in the world! I’ve learned a few things from your comments and others… so thank you for sharing!
Emerson: Good point about giving money and thanks for citing that statistic about money being able to buy 8 times the amount if the food bank can purchase in bulk.
Serena: Nice to learn that your veggie garden is fruitful!
S: What can I say… I was sheltered in my non-church going, childless ways. I suspect all this is about to change… as our little Sam grows and we become more in tune with our community.
I was away on a business trip this week and took a stack of magazines for the plane ride. Here’s something that caught my eye – a profile on the Diaper Bank:
There’s even a how-to manual if anyone is interested in starting their own Diaper Bank at thediaperbank.org.