food assistance

We're trying a new, streamlined format for posting community events. Every week, instead of separately posting community events information, we are gathering them on this virtual bulletin board. Our goal is to provide one-stop-shopping for the events you need to know about.

Please contact me with any feedback: matt@211info.org.

In the days before movie tickets could be purchased ahead of show time on a smart phone, I found myself occasionally standing in a long line that sometimes wrapped around a city block only to find out, when I got close to the box office, that the movie was sold out. Oh, well. Minor irritation.

Marion-Polk Food Share is one of 22 regional food banks in the Oregon Food Bank network. Last fall, Women Ending Hunger, a Food Share auxiliary with over 750 members—women and men-- conducted a stand-in during Go Downtown Salem’s Back to School First Wednesday event with almost 500 volunteers holding empty dinner plates to represent the 37,000 children in Marion and Polk counties depending on their free or reduced price lunch at school—sometimes their only food for the day.

SnowCap Community Charities has been in the business of providing food assistance to low income residents in East Multnomah County since 1967. In September of this year, the organization launched a mobile program, making it possible for them to distribute food at curbside to low-income elderly and disabled. With only a small box truck and a nearly broken-down mini-van, deliveries were slow and hard on volunteers’ backs.

Washingtonians, if you’ve just seen my recent blog post on the Summer Food Service Program in Oregon and wonder if you’ve been left out, no need to be concerned. A similar food assistance program exists in Washington.

I got a kick out of the slogan the Child Nutrition Services people coined for this program: “Food That’s In When School Is Out.” I wish I had thought of that.

It’s hard enough to figure out how to keep kids busy in the summer. But if your children have been on a free or reduced-lunch program during the school year, the thought of having to buy food for meals their school had been supplying can be daunting. Fortunately, Oregon’s Summer Food Service Program (SFSP) is a safety net for children needing food assistance, not just when school is in session, but year round.

Yesterday's Tsunami event reminds one to become familiar with the resources available in the coastal Lane County area. Introduce yourself and loved ones to your community resources.

Listed below are a number of service programs for the Florence area.

Oregon’s hunger needs are well documented. One aspect of this tragedy that many are unaware of is the number of children who go hungry in the summer, when school is out, despite resources that exist. But the good news is you can help reverse this trend today.

Our organization, Partners for a  Hunger-Free Oregon (PHFO), reports that just 26 percent of Oregon children who relied on free and reduced price school lunches during the 2008-09 school year accessed summer feeding programs.