Blog: City Blog

Saturday is Food Day: Plenty of Ways to Help Alleviate Hunger Locally!

Food Day on Saturday offers many ways that people can help solve hunger issues.

Saturday is Food Day, a nationwide effort to alleviate hunger. There are plenty of ways you can get involved in the Knoxville-Knox County Food Policy Council’s efforts to help low-income or isolated local families struggling to get nutritious food and enough of it.

There are multiple ways that individuals, families or church groups can help.

For example, Second Harvest Food Bank of East Tennessee wants to enlist your help. The regional food bank, based in Knoxville, serves 186,000 people each year and distributes more than 18 million pounds of food and groceries.

To make donating easier and more convenient, Second Harvest has implemented a virtual food drive to complement Food Day. This means that this Saturday, before you can watch the Vols take on Alabama, you can simply go to a website and select food items you wish to donate.

“The virtual food drive allows people to donate food to those in need from the comfort of their own homes,” says Brian Blackmon, Deputy Director of the City’s Office of Sustainability. “Pantries often struggle to provide proteins, and I would encourage donors to consider making a donation for items like peanut butter if they’re not sure what they would like to donate.”

Through the website, people can choose from a variety of foods to donate, including staples like milk, fruit, peanut butter, and corn.

To make a virtual donation, visit https://community.secondharvestetn.org/virtual-food-drive.

Connecting Hearts, a program partnered with CAC's Mobile Meals, provides another opportunity to help solve East Tennessee’s hunger problems.

The new program provides food to low-income, homebound seniors. Many participating seniors lack a strong support network of family and friends. So the Connecting Hearts program has made an effort to not simply provide the gift of groceries, but to also give the precious gift of companionship. Volunteers are asked to visit with the participants for at least an hour after dropping off food.

“This is the perfect opportunity for anyone who has wanted to volunteer with Mobile Meals but cannot accommodate the noon delivery time into their schedule, as volunteers are welcome to visit on evenings and weekends,” Blackmon says.

Connecting Heart’s goal is to pair at least 40 seniors with a volunteer who will visit weekly.

To sign up, visit any one of these Kroger locations on Saturday:

- Kroger Fountain City, 5201 N. Broadway
- Kroger Cedar Bluff, Kingston Pike and North Cedar Bluff Road
- Kroger Powell, 6702 Clinton Highway
- Kroger Bearden, 4918 Kingston Pike

More information and instructions on how to sign up to volunteer can be found at http://www.wbir.com/local/connecting-hearts/.

Volunteers sought Saturday to deliver meals to seniors.

Posted by evreeland On 23 October, 2015 at 11:30 AM