LifeHouse Needs Your Help
February 10th, 2010
LifeHouse of Orange County touches the lives of the homeless… that you know. But what you may not be aware of is LifeHouse also touches families with homes who are at risk of not having a meal. Families… those with children and those withoug. For us on a grass roots level, where we give directly to those in need, this is painful to see. Living here in affluent Orange County in the suburbs there is an increasing level of poverty; we see it firsthand. Below, I have inserted statistics and information that is easily accessed from Second Harvest’s web site www.secondharvest.org . I think you will be shocked at the level of poverty here in our own communities.
LifeHouse has two aspects to its existance. One is feeding the homeless – it’s complicated and its diverse. People who chose to live outside – whether because of addictions or the inability to fund themselves , or people who are forced to live outside – through mental illness and any number of other reasons. The other part of LifeHouse is providing weekly groceries to at least 7 families ranging from just the husband and wife to a family with 8 children. We have become a resource for them to get some of the basics as well as maybe some fun things for their family. We hear week after week that what we provide for them gives them some breathing room to pay for other bills – and not just their basic needs but food that they love to eat and snacks that their kids get excited over getting. Some government programs don’t supply money for things like toilet paper and diapers – but they can get those here at LifeHouse.
We buy a majority of our food and supplies from Second Harvest (it’s also called Feeding America). We have developed a food pantry in our house, with 3 refrigerators and a large freezer, we are able to give out fresh food as well as dry goods and toiletries. Right now, my dining room area is filled with toilet paper and diapers. The garage is filled with shelves of food and our office holds the toiletries and other goodies. Currently our food purchases are running about $700 per month – up from $400 to $500 per month when we started a year ago. So, you see, the need is increasing.
We rely almost solely on donations. What we don’t get from generous givers, we pay for ourselves and with recent cutbacks of our own finances, we’ve become more and more strained as months go by. If you would like to know more about what we do, feel free to email me at info@lifehouseministryoc.com. If you feel that LifeHouse would be a good use of your money, click on the page above “how to donate” and give whatever you can. We guarantee that this money will go to the homeless through our hot lunches and to families who just cant make ends meet.
From Second Harvest:
Hunger Report 2010 – Hunger in America 2010 is the largest study of domestic hunger, providing comprehensive and statistically-valid data on our emergency food distribution system and the people Feeding America serves. Hunger in America 2010 is extremely detailed, drawing on data from more than 61,000 interviews with clients and surveys of 37,000 feeding agencies.
The report shows that hunger is increasing at an alarming rate in the United States, and our network is expanding its reach in response:
- Feeding America is annually providing food to 37 million Americans, including 14 million children. This is an increase of 46 percent over 2006, when we were feeding 25 million Americans, including 9 million children, each year.
- That means one in eight Americans now rely on Feeding America for food and groceries.
- Feeding America’s nationwide network of food banks is feeding 1 million more Americans each week than we did in 2006.
- Thirty-six percent of the households we serve have at least one person working.
- More than one-third of client households report having to choose between food and other basic necessities, such as rent, utilities and medical care.
- The number of children the Feeding America network serves has increased by 50 percent since 2006.
Hunger in the Suburbs… The hidden nature of huger and poverty makes us less aware of its prevalence in the suburbs, but hunger does exist there and it is growing.
The growth in poverty and hunger in the suburbs is caused by the lure of job growth, the revitalization of central cities making city life too expensive for many poor people, and the creation of cheaper housing in “inner ring” suburbs, as middle class people move further out.
Facts
- In 2008, the prevalence of household food insecurity in suburban areas was 12.7 percent (6.1 million households), and the prevalence of very low food security was 5.1 percent (2.5 million households).
- Feeding America estimates that 48 percent of all clients served reside in rural/suburban areas.
- Suburban poverty appears to have distinct regional patterns. Fourteen of the fifteen suburbs with the highest poverty rates in 2000 were located in the Southern or Western regions of the country.
- The poverty rate for people living in suburban areas was 9.8 percent in 2008.