The Need

A Community Challenge 

Our community is filled with paradoxes. On the one hand, there is intense natural beauty, bountiful harvests, and personal wealth. While on the other hand there are those in our community that often go unseen, people who find themselves laid-off from work, divorced, or have a medical emergency arise. These folks are caught in a downward spiral, with limited resources, forced to make tough daily choices about what needs they can afford and what will have to wait.

• Striking statistics bring to light the need to assist those in our community that have fallen on hard times.
• U.S. Census Bureau statistics for 2002 indicate that about 13,470 people live in poverty in Grand Traverse, Leelanau, Benzie, Antrim, and Kalkaska Counties (more than 8% of the population)
• Nearly 40,000 people live in low-income households

The Northwest Food Coalition reports that people turned to area pantries, shelters, and community meals programs over 128,000 times for temporary assistance in feeding themselves and their families in 2006. The statistics also show that the number of visits per year has more than doubled from 2001 to 2005.

Throughout our region and the country, food pantries remain the primary means by which people in need obtain emergency food supplies. In most cases, food pantries can only provide highly processed canned and packaged foods full of sugar, salt, and carbohydrates. Though sufficient to quell hunger, these foods add to a pattern of poor nutrition for many families struggling with poverty. Even when there is money to purchase food, low-income families may turn to inexpensive carbohydrates as a dietary mainstay, contributing to poor nutrition, obesity, diabetes, and a host of related health problems. By purchasing locally grown healthy produce, the Fresh Food Partnership is a bridge between people threatened by hunger and the local producers of nutritious fresh food.