What does hunger really look like?
Who are the people who don’t know how they will eat dinner tonight?
What would it feel like to have to choose between paying the electric bill and buying groceries?
For so many of us, hunger is an abstract issue. If we’ve never experienced it, we don’t really know the reality of it. Before I started working at Feeding America, I can honestly say, I didn’t get it. And I certainly didn’t realize how grave the situation really is.
Well, I’ve been enlightened.
There are 36 million Americans currently at risk of hunger. That is 1 in 8 people. Those are the facts, but in this video, you are hearing from individual people, you are hearing their stories. They are mothers, grandfathers, children, friends. They are just like you and me.
Ok, now get ready to throw your stereotypes out the window.
Of the people who receive food support through Feeding America’s network, 36 percent of them live in households where at least one person is employed. And – possibly even more shocking – 89 percent of the people who receive food through Feeding America have homes. This means that only 11 percent of the people supported by Feeding America are actually homeless.
That’s a lot of numbers, but you get the idea. Hunger is not only a challenge faced by the homeless. It’s a challenge faced by people who are struggling to make ends meet, for the parents who have to choose between heating their home or feeding their children lunch, for the career woman who got laid off just as she bought her first apartment, for the senior whose pension just isn’t cutting it. It’s a real, everyday, painful, humbling, scary challenge for 1 of 8 Americans.
Feeding America is a network of more than 200 food banks across the country that support more than 63,000 agencies, including food banks and soup kitchens, all across the country.
Every year, the Feeding America network provides food to more than 25 million low-income people who are facing hunger. That includes more than 9 million children and nearly 3 million seniors.
We are doing a lot to help. With generous donors like Walmart, our top corporate partner in the fight against domestic hunger, we ARE making a difference. But the reality is that there is still much more work to do.
As we say here at Feeding America … No American should go hungry.