Saturday, May 9, will mark the 23rd anniversary of the National Association of Letter Carriers “Stamp Out Hunger” food drive.
This annual collection, the largest one-day food collection event in the nation, has made a difference each year to those across the country who are struggling to make ends meet.
Last year, generous individuals donated more than 72 million pounds of food, which marked the 11th consecutive year that at least 70 million pounds were collected.
Summer donations are traditionally low because potential food drive donors go on vacation and are busy with their children who are home from school.
While donations to food banks are heaviest during the holiday seasons from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day, there is a need throughout the year and the Stamp Out Hunger drive helps to fill the shelves for the summer months. With most school lunch programs suspended during summer months, millions of children must find alternate sources of nutrition.
According to the New Jersey Anti-Hunger Coalition, the food insecurity level in New Jersey was 12.7 percent overall and 19.0 percent for children. That’s some 394,240 children living in food insecure households.
For more information, visit Facebook.com/StampOutHunger.
For 35 years, Feeding America has responded to the hunger crisis in America by providing food to people in need through a nationwide network of food banks.
The concept of food banking was developed by John van Hengel in Phoenix, AZ in the late 1960s. Van Hengel, a retired businessman, had been volunteering at a soup kitchen trying to find food to serve the hungry. One day, he met a desperate mother who regularly rummaged through grocery store garbage bins to find food for her children. She suggested that there should be a place where, instead of being thrown out, discarded food could be stored for people to pick up—similar to the way “banks” store money for future use. With that, an industry was born.
