Oct 29, 2018 | In the News
The holiday season brings togetherness, celebration and gift giving, which can be both joyful and stressful.
Imagine if your primary stressor wasn’t holiday shopping, but whether you were able to feed your family. During the winter break, many children who rely on school meals for nutrition go without, and many families look to our food pantries for help.
To supplement our pantry giving, we started Holidays Without Hunger to help families through this time of year, so they too can celebrate and enjoy a holiday meal. This year’s two food packing events will be held Dec. 15 (North Naples Middle School) and Dec. 22 (Lee Civic Center), and our goal is to raise $100,000 and pack 1 million meals.
Please go to www.mealsofhope.org to donate or volunteer, and help us feed struggling individuals this holiday season. You will be supporting our mission “to inspire and empower communities to come together to end hunger!”
Oct 23, 2018 | In the News
Recently our Director of Development, Brandon Dowdy, visited one of our mobile pantries and saw something that he said “will stick with me forever.”
Dowdy saw a young boy who just finished going through a Meals of Hope mobile pantry line with his mother and seemed full of excitement as he claimed food items. Dowdy spoke with the boy and learned that he and his mother have become regular pantry visitors.
Dowdy learned that the boy’s family has relied on the pantry since Hurricane Irma devastated Southwest Florida last year. The storm severely damaged the family’s home and caused the boy’s father to lose his job. Without that head-of-household income and a lack of savings to repair their roof, the family landed in the Meals of Hope pantry line.
Later that afternoon, Dowdy passed the local bus stop and saw the boy and his mother waiting for their ride home. He waved at the two, and the boy gave an energetic thumbs up and said, “We love Meals of Hope!”
Meals of Hope is proud to serve more than 1,000 families each week through our 11 pantry sites. We have calculated that each family who receives food from our pantries can save around $3,000 annually to help with the high cost of housing in Southwest Florida, among other necessities.
It with that notion that we ask the community and our amazing sponsors to dig deep once again to help us serve families who have not fully recovered from hard times. Please visit our home page to learn more. #HolidaysWithoutHunger
Oct 3, 2018 | In the News
Several community leaders participated in last weekend’s Food Stamp Challenge, which replicated the weekend food insecurity many children experience when school lunches are not available.
Participants were asked to spend $14.93 on groceries for seven meals (Friday dinner through Sunday dinner). The $14.93 represents the maximum monthly allotment for SNAP benefits of $192 per person, or $2.13 per meal.
Andy Reed, director of development, Naples Children & Education Foundation, Founders of the Naples Winter Wine Festival, participated in the challenge, and said, “It wasn’t as hard as I thought to eat enough, but it was almost impossible to eat healthy. A lot of carbs and salt.”
Reed’s challenge meals consisted of:
Friday dinner (for two) –Tostito’s Pizza ($1.40 for two people)
Saturday breakfast – pack of Ramen with one fried egg; half banana ($1.16)
Saturday lunch – eight-piece nuggets from Chick-fil-A (free with promotion)
Saturday dinner – single macaroni and cheese cup ($1.00)
Sunday breakfast – two eggs; half bagel with butter ($2.10)
Sunday lunch – black beans and rice ($1.69)
Sunday Dinner – baked potato with gravy packet and free pack of hot sauce and pepper from Chick-fil-A the day prior ($2.00)
As Reed said, quality vs. quantity of food was the biggest challenge. Many children, veterans and elderly individuals face that same challenge every day, eating processed foods out of necessity.
Please contact us to learn more about how you can help provide fresh, healthy food to struggling individuals in your area.
Sep 26, 2018 | Uncategorized
The Food Stamp Challenge, which takes place this weekend, is designed to replicate what many children experience every weekend, when Friday lunch is their last complete meal until they return to school Monday morning. Many teachers do not test students on Mondays, as they know students are not able to work at their best because of their lack of food during the weekend.
The maximum monthly allotment for SNAP benefits is $192 per person, which equals $2.13 per meal. The challenge begins with dinner on Friday, Sept. 28, and ends with dinner on Sunday, Sept. 30, for seven meals total. Participating community leaders will spend $14.93 on groceries for those seven meals and document their experience to raise hunger awareness.
Follow @mealsofhope through the weekend to see how participants fare.
Sep 20, 2018 | In the News
Meals of Hope President/CEO Stephen Popper started the organization after his mother heard of school children in Haiti having difficulty learning because they did not have enough food. She knew of a food packing program in the Midwest and wanted to know if her son would ship the food if she found a way to collect it.
Popper realized there wasn’t a food packing program in Southwest Florida to help local needy families, so he started doing research and working with food supply manufacturers. He contacted the Rotary Club of Naples, which offered to be part of the food packing process as a community service project.
Popper visited the Naples High School cafeteria as a site and began inviting people around the community for his first meal packing event (Naples High School’s Student Government Association just packed the organization’s 50 millionth meal). Popper sent 8,000 of the packed meals to Haiti and worked with the Harry Chapin Food Bank to distribute the remaining meals.
“The feeling was so empowering,” Popper said. “Just watching all of these people getting together for fellowship and packing meals. I made a commitment to pack one million meals that year. We just packed our 50th million meal. We are very blessed to be able to help the hunger epidemic to this degree.”
After that first packing event, Popper began to research what types of food would provide the most nutrition. He created a Beans and Rice packed meal with added soy protein. He then created a Macaroni and Cheese Meal, fortified with 21 vitamins and minerals, that beat a more recognizable brand in blind taste tests.
“It was like hitting a home run,” Popper said. “The meals were so well received. Over the years we have developed four different meals – the Beans and Rice Casserole; Fortified Macaroni and Cheese; Fortified Pasta with Tomato Sauce; and a Fortified Cinnamon Sugar, Diced Apple Oatmeal. We actually had someone tell us he can’t find a macaroni and cheese in stores that is as good as ours.”
