In these tough times, as much as you wish you had the time to volunteer in your community, it may not always be realistic or possible. Days are busy with work, kids, running errands, making dinner and chores.

These days we rely on social media and our smart phones to get things done and socialize with our friends, but did you know that you could use these same devices to help Second Harvest fight hunger?

Awareness is a powerful tool in helping to fight hunger, and with an entire culture of people connected to cyberspace everyday, we have created an easy 5 Ways to Fight Hunger Using Social Media checklist you can use to spread awareness about this epidemic in our community.

Share.  We were taught to do it since elementary and social media is all about sharing!  On our Facebook and Twitter, Second Harvest posts stories of hope, hunger fighting events, and the problems of hunger in our community daily. It’s easy and takes only a few seconds to share these stories and links with friends and family, whether through reposting or retweeting.  The scope of social media expands from Facebook and Twitter, too, so take full advantage of other online avenues, such as Google +, Ning Communities, LinkedIn, group texts, or any one of your favorite social media outlets.

Participate. There are many opportunities in social media to do more than just share posts. On Facebook, for instance you can help us win Ron Jon Surf Shop’s Holiday Charity Contest. The charity with the most votes will receive $2,500 and two Ron Jon surfboards to auction off. Vote for us daily! With Second Harvest able to purchase up to $9 worth of groceries for every $1 donated, you could help feed a lot of hungry families this holiday season!

Educate.  When you have those free moments in your day, read hunger links shared by friends, family, or Second Harvest. You’ll learn the changes in hunger demand from year to year, read stories about the struggles of others and understand how easily it could happen to anybody. Educating yourself on the hunger epidemic in Central Florida is an eye opening experience and can be disheartening, but educating yourself about solutions and sharing them with friends is an action that builds hope and solutions!

Inspire. Leading by example is a great way to influence friends, family, and even strangers around you. Every time you donate to Second Harvest, share it with friends and family! Doing so can inspire them to do the same, and every donation, no matter how big or small, helps our community. You can also inspire people with your own stories of hunger. Write a blog or post about your struggles and how you overcame them, the people who helped you along the way, and other inspiring details.

Create.  Thanks to social media tools, communities such as Ning, Facebook, and Google make it easy to create groups for awareness.  If you feel like any of the above isn’t enough, and you feel a little bit more comfortable with technology, it has become easier to create a group of like-minded persons to build awareness and create solutions. Using online social groups, you can combine Share, Participate, Educate, and Inspire to orchestrate local food drives, charity events, or awareness campaigns to help benefit Second Harvest and the Central Florida community. Create banners or posters depicting hunger and hope, and share them on Facebook, tweet them through Twitter, or post them on the Second Harvest Facebook!

All of the above works easily interchangeably with each other, making it easy to use social media to fight hunger.  Whether it’s tweeting links, sharing on facebook, or gathering friends online to organize a food drive, social media is proving to be a very powerful tool to fight hunger.  At a time where busy schedules can make it difficult to volunteer the hours you’d like into your community, it good to know that you can still make a difference using social media.

Melissa Kear
Second Harvest Food Bank Intern

“Gross!” is what we commonly hear from children when they are asked to try vegetables. We decided to take on the challenge and turn that response to “Mmm-mmm…good!”

We successfully completed our challenge with the generous help of CarMax. We piloted GROSS, a 5-week nutrition education program at the Callahan Community Center in the Parramore area. Every week one of the five fruit and vegetable color families was highlighted, and children made recipes with fruits and vegetables in that color family.

Who would’ve known that raw red bell peppers and radishes would be enjoyed so much by 2nd graders? This kid-friendly recipe was a hit!

Give it a try:

Red Pepper and Radish Pizza
(Sample Serving)

Ingredients:
1 Cracker (We used Cuban crackers)
1 Tsp Low Fat/Light Cream Cheese
4 small pieces of diced radish
4 small pieces of diced red bell pepper

Directions:
• Spread the cream cheese onto the cracker.
• Sprinkle the diced radishes onto the cream cheese.
• Sprinkle the diced red peppers onto the cream cheese.

View photos from the last week of our nutrition education program at Callahan Community Center.

 
Maria Ali, RD, LD/N
Nutrition Manager

This past Saturday we partnered with Orange County Public Schools and the Winter Park Health Foundation to provide food to families this holiday season. The two week break from school can be especially difficult to children who rely on the free and reduced school lunch program. With this in mind, we gathered a team of volunteers, 22,000 lbs of food and marketed the weekend food distribution to children participating in our Hi-Five program at eight of the schools located near our two distribution sites.

 When I arrived at Cheney Elementary on Saturday, there were already some families there over an hour and a half earlier than our scheduled starting time. We had 10 palettes of potatoes, oranges, bread , pastries, and pantry boxes filled with 14 common items like peanut butter and tuna. As the morning went on, we ended up distributing food to 450 families at Cheney and Hungerford Elementary.

A couple of the stories stood out to me that demonstrated how our community comes together in times of need. Two mothers whose families received food that morning returned to our site to volunteer the rest of the day. Another mother, who had no transportation, walked for two hours to get to our site. She was willing to physically carry all of the food back home. Thankfully, another volunteer loaded up her groceries and drove her home.

A father and son rode to our site on bicycles and a pair of volunteers tried their best to safely load the bicycles with any food that they could carry. When another recipient family saw this they offered to take the father and son, bicycles, and food back home.

While we know it isn’t enough food for two entire weeks in meals it was enough to make an immediate difference in these families’ lives. It was a great way to come together as a community and fight hunger in Central Florida.

Brady Koch
Director of Agency Relations & Programs

I would like to share a testimony written by Andy Kimpel. I hope his story inspires you as much as it did me!

Maria Diestro
Online Services and Communications Manager  

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Feeding the Community One Day at a Time by Andy Kimpel

I work for a pallet company based in Orlando called CHEP. Why is that important you ask? Well, it’s where My Story really begins. I got involved with food banking a few years ago when I was asked to coordinate our company’s interaction with the national food bank organization called Feeding America.

At CHEP, our pallets help transport millions of pounds of food products every day and the link to food banking was, and is, a very logical one. However, I had no idea what food banking was or how it worked. I had even less knowledge about who was getting food assistance or how prevalent hunger was in my own community.

Literally hundreds of volunteer hours later, I now have a much deeper understanding of food banking and how necessary it is, especially in times like these. I have gone from relatively zero engagement to almost daily activity locally with Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida and nationally with the Feeding America team in Chicago.

I’ve found that the more I help, the more I want to help. SHFB of Central Florida is a member of the Feeding America network that includes 200 other food banks around the country. This insight at multiple levels is rare for someone outside of food banking operations and a better knowledge of the entire food bank supply chain gives me the ability to help even more effectively.

The local work I am doing has a direct impact on our community’s future. I have recruited friends and family into this effort and we know we are changing lives every day. Food helps people perform better in school and work, create new opportunities and provide hope in tough times. Food is a basic requirement for our survival and I believe we all need to work to ensure that everyone gets their fair share. It’s not about being righteous or moral or political or even having a higher purpose. Sometimes it is simply about helping someone to survive until tomorrow. That’s as basic as it gets. Helping people right here in Orlando is a big plus for my family and I. For us, this cannot be more of a win-win situation. By helping locally, I am actually improving my family’s quality of life by improving conditions in our schools and supporting our local economy.

At the national level, I am able to help coordinate truckload shipments of food into various food banks. I help food manufacturers and distributors understand how easy it is to donate and how we can all work to end hunger across the U.S. I also help numerous food banks across the country with the flow of goods and provide suggestions on how they can work most efficiently with food donors and with CHEP.

Most people reading this will never have to worry about where their next meal will come from. But thousands of people in our area will. And do. The current economy has boosted local food assistance needs up by 400 percent in some areas and I feel compelled to help. I’m not a banker, but maybe food assistance helped someone get their bills paid this month. I’m not a teacher, but maybe I helped someone pass the FCAT last spring. I’m not a doctor, but maybe I helped save a life today. All those maybes drive my efforts at the food bank.

Volunteering with SHFB of Central Florida has opened my eyes and made me aware that hunger is right here in our backyard. It has shown me that 24 percent of the people getting food assistance are children who need it to grow and thrive and keep our community moving forward. I have been given the opportunity to help solve the hunger problem and it is a really good feeling. That’s why I keep going back for seconds.

Article by Andy Kimpel
Posted by InsightMagazine