Last night we watched "Frontline" on PBS and it was a lesson well learned about the number of children in the United States that are hungry. 1 in 5 families have children that are "food insecure" and this is just silly. We have farmers who are paid to not plant crops. We have large and small companies that are buying back their stocks because they have huge reserves of cash available due to increased productivity and they are not hiring people. These families do not convey the old image of people on drugs. These are families, through no fault of their own who are not prepared to meet the challenges of our society or who have suffered a poor education and cannot find work.
I know that many of you receive requests for cash donations every day if you are like me and while you would like to help, simply feel a crush of this activity gets to be too much. However, if you have a child, look at her or him and wonder how you would feel if you could not provide a meal for them. In the program last night we noted that one man had a contracting job where previously he had five jobs lined up and now due to the recession does not have any work. He lost everything. He worked and I am sure as a contractor he worked hard. Another woman suffered because she was raising the children by herself as her husband took off and left her with the two children to raise and feed. Try as hard she could, she simply didn't have the ability to work herself out of the hole.
Listening to the children who spoke well and hearing their message where they knew that if they didn't get back to school they would be homeless as adults and/or have to take a low paying job and live as they were doing with their parents. These were intelligent children who dreamed of wonderful things beyond the singular thought of hunger. However hunger was always on their mind.
We are attempting to resolve part of this problem and now we are providing weekend backpacks to 69 families within the greater Charles Village community. Today 69 children will go home with full backpacks to share with their families so that they can dream as children often do and not have to think about where their next meal will come from. We have a long way to go if we hope to change this problem in Baltimore, but it is something that we can do to reach the remaining 1,631 hungry children. We started providing food for 4 children, then to 7, then to 14 and now are feeding 69.
Please send a donation to Heart's Place Services, Inc., 2640 St. Paul Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21218 and let us help one more child and family each weekend to be a little more healthy. Help us help these children who want to dream of being Doctors and Scientists achieve their goals because they are no longer hungry and can think of other things than being hungry. It currently costs all of us $1,200. per week to provide this food for these children, but if we are to grow more as we really need to do, we will need a lot of money to end this problem.
Can we depend on you to help us? We certainly hope so. Merry Christmas and a wonderful New Year.
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