Welcome

Welcome to another edition of MAZON’s eAdvocate. At the end of this week, we will celebrate the new Jewish month of Kislev. Kislev is a month of communal life. Before nature rests, the last harvests take place, and the festival of Chanukah is celebrated before the winter comes upon us with its darker and cooler days.

As the earth yields its last crops to glean before the winter, this eAdvocate reflects on the fruitful work of people and groups that work to share their harvests with their communities and hungry families. While many of us have plenty, cooler and darker winter days ahead add to the struggles of those who cannot afford a warm house and who cannot put a hot meal on the table. This eAdvocate reminds us to be generous to those suffering from poverty and hunger during the cold winter months and always.

Sharing Harvests

Freehold Area Open Door
Freehold, NJ

Freehold Area Open Door is a multi-faceted emergency food provider that blends direct food provision with community involvement and collaborative work. Year-round, Open Door operates a food pantry that provides residents with enough food to prepare over 125,000 meals. Open Door also offers a hot lunch program that serves 46,000 meals annually. The group supplements its core programs with food box distribution, an emergency financial assistance program, an after school program for 3rd, 4th and 5th graders, and a scholarship program. Through its community-based initiative “Plant a Row for the Hungry,” the group asks local gardeners to plant an extra row or two of fruits and vegetables and then to donate the harvest to Open Door. The success of this initiative validates Open Door’s efforts to educate the community and to create collaborative solutions to hunger in the region.

South Plains Food Bank
Lubbock, TX

South Plains Food Bank offers comprehensive programs feeding people in need while educating the community about hunger. In addition to food distribution, SPFB also operates feeding programs for kids, a farm and orchard and Breedlove, a food dehydration plant. The Farm, Orchard, and Garden program combats hunger by growing fresh produce and by teaching others to grow their own yields in order to achieve personal, economic, and community self sufficiency. Through a farm and two additional community gardens, the program yields an average of 500,000 pounds of produce annually. The program then distributes 400 boxes of food weekly, which represents 15,000 meals. The food bank also enjoys the helping hands of students involved in GRUB. GRUB offers opportunities to high-risk youth to learn job skills while offering volunteer work on the farm. The students who volunteer during the school year can also apply for paying positions on the farm during the summer months. In this way, GRUB helps to empower youth and low-income people to become stewards of sustainable food production. This is an inspiring example of an initiative that brings fresh produce to low-income people while involving them in the process, and giving them the tools to achieve self-sufficiency.

Lowcountry Food Bank
Charleston, SC

Lowcountry Food Bank distributes 10 million pounds of food annually to more than 400 agencies in coastal South Carolina. With a growing interest in provide healthy food, the food bank conducts a successful gleaning initiative called Growing Food Locally, a program involving farmers in the provision of fresh nutritious food to hungry people. Every year, millions of pounds of fresh fruits and vegetables are missed by commercial harvesting methods. With the help of volunteers, the food bank salvages the leftover crops before they spoil. Through this initiative, 1.5 million pounds of produce were collected and distributed last year. The food bank educates low-income clients about the benefits of healhty eating with educational material available through its online monthly column, Eat Well/Be Well.