Eatonville Boys & Girls Club’s Kids Cafe welcomed over 120 youngsters with a hot afterschool meal on its opening day. The club sits in the heart of historic Eatonville; the nation’s oldest established African-American township. It is a stone’s throw from Hungerford Elementary and draws more than 200 students from nearby elementary, middle, and high schools.

Joyce Davis, who prepared  the meals, tell us that before Kids Cafe, children would receive small snacks consisting of bagels or cheese perhaps two or three times weekly, without regularity.

Second Harvest Food Bank, with the support of the Winter Park Health Foundation, has made it possible for these children to rely on a wholesome meal each and every day while school is in session. During the summer, Second Harvest will sponsor the club so that it may participate in the Summer Food Service Program which helps bridge the nutritional gap when children lack access to school cafeterias.

The club can now access a wide variety of food product from our main warehouse. Nutritional education will also be provided starting in early February.  Since children’s diets are generally a function of what happens at home, our hope is that the children will influence their parents by recounting what they learn at the club.  Menu tips, dietary guidelines and support will also be provided to the club’s cook.

We are extremely pleased with the first day’s turnout and expect a significant increase by week’s end.

Thanks to the Winter Park Health Foundation, Boys & Girls Clubs of Central Florida, Deb Watson, Austin Long, Rod Bargaineer, and Joyce Davis for their enthusiasm and support as we worked closely to make this happen!

View a map of our 13 Kids Cafes in 3 counties: Second Harvest Food Bank Kids Cafes >>

Photos from opening day:

Santos Maldonado
Childhood Hunger Manager

Our intern Melissa Kear, wraps up Hunger Action Month in this latest blog post. 

October is just around the corner, and with it (we hope!) comes cooler weather! Using our 30 Ways in 30 Days calendar, you can count down the last days of September and support Hunger Action Month every day of the week.

If you haven’t had a chance to visit our main facility for one of our popular Food for Thought Tours, please plan to join us Wednesday, September 21, 2011  6 pm for a special Food Bank tour of Second Harvest Food Bank. RSVP is required at CFLHungerAction.org. Spend one very interesting  hour with us learning about hunger in Central Florida and what Second Harvest is doing to help.

Celebrate Thursday with pizza! NYPD Pizza’s College Park location will be donating 15% of your bill to the food bank from 4-10pm when you mention “Second Harvest”.  Who knew you could give back while munching on your favorite NYPD Pizza slice, and what a great way to mark off your calendar!

Want to do more to help fight hunger? Take Friday and set up a time to volunteer at Second Harvest!  Find out more about volunteering opportunities at FeedHopeNow.org, and learn what you can do to help support your community. What better way to strike Friday off your calendar than by taking a step to be more involved in helping to fight hunger.

If you have extra time Saturday, help support Hunger Action Month by taking a quick shopping trip to pick up and donate critical need items.  Some of these items included: meals in a can, canned tuna, nonfat dry milk, peanut butter, oatmeal, nutritional drinks, dry beans, evaporated milk, canned vegetables, canned soups, pastas, rice, and baby food.  These items are all important in providing nutritional foods to those in need, and in many cases can be found in your local grocery store’s buy one get one free deals.

Sunday, register your school food drive and get a free toolkit. It’s an easy and efficient way to give back and help your community.  If registering and running a food drive isn’t in your schedule, check out our calendar to find other local food drives and how you can help support them and your community.

The start of a workweek can be a little crazy, so if you are short on time Monday, head over to our website, where you can donate a gift to help hunger.  Every dollar donated can provide up to $9 worth of food, so whether you can spare a little or a lot, your donation will be making a difference!

In case you can’t make our Wednesday’s Food for Thought Tour, join us Tuesday the 27th at 11:30 am to make our last tour of September.  Remember to RSVP at CFLHungerAction.org to join us for an hour tour of the food bank.  We look forward to seeing you!

Your support for Hunger Action Month has been amazing, and we are excited to see Central Florida come together to help fight hunger.  From September 18th – September 24th, Downtown Orlando will be lighting the Fountain at Lake Eola orange in support of Hunger Action Month, so take some time to stroll around the lake, reflect on the events of this month, and send us all of your pictures by the orange lighted fountain on Facebook or share them with us on Twitter, and thank you again for all that you do to support Hunger Action Month and Second Harvest Food Bank.

Melissa Kear
Second Harvest Food Bank intern

Let’s hear it for AARP! This year, they have made a major commitment to hunger among older Americans. Our CEO, Dave Krepcho, wrote about it in his “Hunger and the Daytona 500?” blog post in February.

Well this year, AARP designated Friday, September 9 as it’s Day of Service where the main focus was also hunger. On this day staff and volunteers nationwide went out to serve in their local communities.

How is this related to Second Harvest? Well, on Friday, September 9 we had 60 Winter Park AARP volunteers at our sorting facility putting together senior packs. Basically, they took over the food bank on that day and put together 5,452 senior food packs. Pretty amazing, right?

None of this would be possible without funding from the Winter Park Health Foundation. Second Harvest has been talking to the foundation about the different ways they could get involved with us. They instantly thought of seniors and that is where the AARP tie in came into the project.

Senior Food Packs
Each pack weights slightly more than 10 pounds and was developed by our nutrition manager, Maria Ali, with input from our senior feeding partners. The packs contain 10 components and include foods from every food group. We took senior needs into account and provided foods that were simple to cook and versatile.

The distribution sites and recipients of the food packs will be in Winter Park, Maitland and Eatonville.

This is unlike any food distribution that Second Harvest has done in the past. The packs will be distributed through a number of unconventional methods: 

- through fire stations and EMT’s
- through Walgreen’s pharmacists
- through neighborhood and community centers
- through faith communities
- to homebound seniors known to food delivery programs, (specifically Food Angels)
- to Plymouth and Calvary Towers senior residences.  
  
Did you know that of the 51 million Americans who are food insecure, nearly six million are over the age of 60?
Thanks to the manpower of the AARP volunteers and the funding from Winter Park Health Foundation, we are going to be able to reach and feed more seniors in need this year.   

Photos from the day:

Maria Diestro
Online Services and Communications Manager

Aycha Williams is Fashion Chair of Second Harvest’s Wine Women & Shoes Orlando event. We asked her to get with her committee and to write about the experience they have had putting together the fashion show for this exciting event. Wine Women & Shoes will take place on Saturday, April 23, 2011 at the Royal Plaza Hotel.

As volunteers for Second Harvest Food Bank’s Wine, Women & Shoes event, the fashion show committee has been working non-stop for a fabulous Fashion Show! We have been received so well by the community’s local businesses and by Orlando’s fashion industry.  Everyone we talked to was more than willing and excited to contribute and support the cause.

First step for the fashion show was to decide on our fashion partners. We partnered mostly with Orlando’s local businesses for the looks for the fashion show. This way; while helping Second Harvest’s cause of putting an end to hunger in Central Florida we were also able to support the local businesses.

Tammy Giaimo, owner of Jacobson’s at Park Avenue and Aimee Collins-Hitchner owner of Ginger Boutique at Winter Park Village agreed to partner with us for the fashion show. We were also approached by Melanie Sweetland with White House & Black Market Store at Altamonte Mall and were very excited to include them as a part of the event. The fashion show will have this summer’s must have looks as well as a peek into the fall closet of brands such as Escada. So get ready to enjoy an amazing fashion show while tasting some delicious wine from Florida and California’s select wineries.

Next; we started looking for models and once again we were very pleasantly surprised by the interest and support to help.

We walked in to the Maile Image, Modeling and Acting School of Winter Park and received a very warm welcome from Debby Tapia, the Vice President. She put in a request for our criteria and we received some great resumes and headshots to review. The Maile Modeling and Acting School has been working with students and training talent since 1982. The school offers classes in Image & Confidence Development, On Camera Acting, Professional Modeling for children, teens and adults. Some successful graduate Maile School models and actors are Mandy Moore, Vincent Martell on Everybody Hates Chris and as the voice of Phineaus on the popular Disney show Phineaus and Ferb,  and Paul Amadi in hot movie The Blind Side and 2 Miss Americas.

In addition; our own friends, beautiful women with style; business professionals, stay at home mothers all offered to help support our cause. Follow our blog to learn more about our models; we will have more posts about them and their passion to help in the coming days.

A great fashion show comes with great music! Our music will be mixed by DJ Clinton. If you like to dance and have been to Park Avenue club venues for late night dancing then you must know Clinton. He will be the DJ for the complete event and the fashion show.

We also could not have done without: LMG Inc. of Orlando; they have graciously donated the free rental of projectors and lighting, Quest Drapery has provided discounts on the purchase of drapery for the show and finally Video Equipment Rentals-VER, Inc. has donated the free rental of the complete sound system.

Like we said at the beginning; we are more than ready for a fabulous fashion show at Second Harvest’s Wine, Women & Shoes event! Latest fashion trends, beautiful models to be accompanied by great music of today and the 80s… If you have not purchased your tickets yet; you can do so by visiting www.winewomenandshoes.com/second harvest

Check back for more news on the fashion show, our models and about their passion to help end hunger.

Aycha Williams
Fashion Chair
Wine, Women & Shoes

On a chilly, rainy Saturday morning, Second Harvest Food Bank and Winter Park Health Foundation staff teamed up to unload a truckload of food in the parking lots of Glenridge Middle School, Hungerford and Cheney Elementary schools. 

 Thanks to a generous grant from the Foundation, Second Harvest was set up to distribute emergency food boxes to families who are struggling.  Word of the distribution had been circulated through local emergency food pantries, and there was no shortage of people who needed the help.  

Even before the truck arrived, cars had been lining up since before daybreak. Many of the vehicles contained more than one family, and had arrived early to avoid missing out on the getting one or two of the boxes.   

This distribution was a little different than others have been in the past, mostly because of the steady drizzle of rain. People mostly stayed inside their vehicles this time, except to hop out and quickly secure their food in the trunk.  

Still, smiling, relieved faces of all ages and ethnicities could be plainly seen through the dripping windows, and a heartfelt ‘thank you!’ was the most-often heard phrase that day. In all, 470 boxes of wholesome, staple food items found their way back to homes.  

Additional shout out to OCPS Nutrition Services for providing all of the volunteers for the sites.

Brady Koch
Director of Agency Relations & Programs

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