Welcome to our new web page.
This effort started last year but was derailed by Hurricane Katrina. While our Katrina relief effort continues, it is now at a manageable state and we’re able to conduct other, more routine, activities. I plan to provide a monthly update blog unless needed more often.
Today, disaster recovery along coastal Mississippi and Alabama primarily involves rebuilding as opposed to emergency food distribution. Construction workers from across the nation have descended upon the area to rebuild homes and businesses. As a result, our efforts have shifted from mass food distribution to targeted family food box distribution through a number of churches and community organizations. This effort is required because many families are strapped with the expenses related to rebuilding while still unemployed or underemployed. Insurance companies continue to battle with the people of the coast over flood versus wind related coverage which has left many with no insurance payments eight months after the storm. Rather then wait, these people are using their credit and available funds to work on their homes and in those cases a food box helps indirectly but in a significant manner. A recent food box recipient wrote us that receiving an emergency food box saved them $50 to $75 they could then spend on sheet rock to repair walls or replacement curtains for the windows. Our intent is to use funds from various grants to continue the food box program through at least the end of 2006. Our food boxes contain a variety of donated food items coming through America’s Second Harvest-The Nation’s Food Bank Network and food items purchased to round out the diet. In other words if we have donated spaghetti sauce but no noodles we purchases the noodles. This has allowed us to provide 50 pound food boxes with a wholesale value of approximately $75 (the retail value is over $90) for about $7. In other words for every $7 donated we’re able to give a family over 10 times the value in food.
We’re also staying busy getting ready for any future storms. Thanks to generous donations from across the nation to America’s Second Harvest, the network has been able to provide us with funds to deploy 20 emergency pantry units along our portion of the gulf coast as well as refrigerated trucks to move the food. The sites will be equipped with walk-in freezer units and emergency generators to power the freezers, lights and phones. The sites will serve as emergency food distribution points in any future disaster. During non-emergency times the churches and non-profit organizations where the units are located will use them for their community pantries, Kids Café programs, church events, even cooking sites for relief workers helping with rebuilding the communities of the gulf coast. Because we know where every site is and how much frozen and dry goods they can handle, we’ll be able to send food immediately after a future disaster even when phone lines and cell towers are out of operation.
Thanks to support from Share Our Strength and Kraft Foods we have also been able to expand our Kids Café program into Mississippi this summer. Staff attended training conduct by the Mississippi Department of Education in the spring in Jackson Mississippi to become familiar with Mississippi procedures and paperwork for the national Summer Lunch Program. Three locations in the Moss Point/Pascagoula area singed up to work with us in providing summer lunches to children and several will probably continue with our after school snack and nutrition education program in the fall along with new sites. Mississippi has the lowest participation rate in the nation in the summer lunch program in spite of significant poverty and the situation has only been compounded due to last summer’s storms. We hope to expand our program year by year so that more Mississippi children and families get the support they need in future years. This program matches a program we began in Alabama three years ago.
That’s it for this month!
Dave
