STX Food Bank Celebrates 15th Anniversary
It is been a great year and a half serving as president on the board of directors of the South Texas Food Bank. We are blessed that we have a caring and hard working board to help our communities.
Being involved in the fight against hunger, however, the board of directors and myself have become more conscious of what is happening around our communities. Unfortunately, we see the world through different eyes now. We see things that were right in front of us but we had never noticed it before. We see people in need, children going to bed hungry, the elderly struggling to buy their medicines and nutrition, and families struggling to make and meet.
The Food Bank serves as a source of hope for many of these individuals. Unfortunately hunger does not only happen during the holidays. Hunger does not take vacations. Hunger happens everyday in our communities. It has become clear to me that as we travel, we find that there are a lot of people that do not understand what the Food Bank is, how it works, or whom it serves.
According to U.S. Census, we have a population of 317,344 inhabitants but sad to say 33.6% of these or about 106,627 live below poverty level. It is even worse when we know that 41.8% of all our children (over 46,000) are included in the poverty statistic. These are starling numbers, but what is more frightening is that while we can inundate you with these types of numbers, each of these represent a living human being that might be our neighbor, our friend or even a relative.
This is not the pretty side of our community but the Food Bank is not about being pretty but rather about being part of the solution to one of the harsh realities of our communities. To do our part, the STFB serves as a central solicitation, collection, processing, warehousing, and distribution center for our food network of over 150 non-profit agencies.
So who are the people that we help? They are people from all walks of life, maybe from the 5,000 senior citizens from the CSFP program, or one of the 500 children that attend our Kids Cafes, or maybe one of the 17,000 families that receive assistance every month.