Stamp Out Hunger Food Drive – Tomorrow! Leave Cans for Your Mail Carrier to Collect

I know most of you are in the throws of Shabbat prep, but I’m hoping some of you might still see this.

Tomorrow (May 14) is Stamp Out Hunger Day. The Association of National Letter Carriers, together with Feeding America, is launching America’s single largest food drive tomorrow.

Here’s how it works: Just gather up some non-perishable food items, leave them in a bag by your mail box, and your letter carrier will collect them and help distribute them to food pantries around your city.

If you are anything like me, you have a few (or more than a few) items sitting on your shelves that you can contribute – brownie mix, cereal, peanut butter, salad dressing, dried beans, canned vegetables, and the list goes on.

Most of these items we are able to get for free – or very inexpensively – and can easily replace thanks to couponing. Yet for the recipient, these items will be an immeasurable blessing.

Here are a few facts about hunger in America, just to help you motivate to do some spring cleaning of your pantry right before Shabbat:

• 50 million Americans live in a food-insecure household. One-third of them are children.
• 1 in 8 Americans now rely on food banks for some or all of their groceries.
• The states of Arkansas, Mississippi, Georgia, Texas and North Carolina have an even higher percentage of food-insecure households – as many as 17% of those state’s residents struggle with hunger. I can only imagine that the recent tornadoes have exacerbated an already precarious situation. Particularly if you live in one of these five states, please give as generously as you can.

Get more information about the Stamp Out Hunger campaign here.

I’m sorry I didn’t post about this amazing initiative sooner, but I just now got an email from a reader (thanks, Dani!) alerting me to this.