March 5, 2020
Simon Jacques of the Oregon Food Bank thanked Oregonians for donating 76.2 million pounds of food after their latest 2020 food drive. The food needed has risen 68% since 2015. The Oregon Food Bank is an organization that makes food boxes and distributes food all around Oregon to hungry children and adults. An easy way to help is to host food drives at schools. A food drive is when people collect long lasting food and bring it to the Oregon Food Bank. People can also volunteer at the Food Bank and help pack food. Donations help save people—maybe even one of your friends—throughout Oregon.Oregon Food Bank had spread its wings, too, reaching out to food banks in other states across the nation. Together, the food banks have established a network of emergency food and shelter services, called Stop Hunger. A congressional bill earlier this week was signed into law, allocating $10 billion a year to Stop Hunger. President Tenesha Williams applauded the law this morning from the White House, noting that it was an example of lawmakers working in a bipartisan way with scientists and social work personnel across the nation.
Since the 2008 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on climate change, we have know that humans are responsible for global warming. Subsequent reports in 2012 and 2016 warned that a worldwide massive and urgent response was needed to help feed the people around the world. Rising global temperatures threaten food supplies across the world with drought and unprecedented heat waves, withering farmers' crops like wheat and rice. What has been harvested over the last decade is simply too expensive for the majority of world population to buy any longer. Therefore, 30,000 people will go to bed hungry in Oregon tonight. All around the world one billion people are hungry every day. 16 million kids in America aren't getting the food they need. Since the beginning of the Great Recession in 2008, food box distribution has increased 79%. Now in 2020 the Oregon Food bank is delivering over 2.1 million emergency food boxes every year. That has almost doubled since 2013.
With the signing of law and the establisment of the Stop Hunger emergency food and shelter centers, however, there is now hope. Stop Hunger will not only deliver food for all hungry Americans right to their door, they also have many buildings where they feed hungry people and give them a room to stay for up to one month.
Hi my name is Nai'a, I am a student at Punahou School. Your blog was very inspiring. I liked how yours was not just about donating food and just focusing on hunger, but I like how your last sentence (maybe paragraph) was about giving them shelter for up to a month. All your statistics and percentages really gave me a good idea of how really bad world hunger is. This topic is probably one of the biggest problems in our world. It will be hard to decrease the number of people in hunger, but hopefully your idea will work. I suggest instead of allowing people to only stay for a month, get architects to build something like an apartment or large shelter. What I think is that if you had a large shelter (but as big a a hotel or apartment) with about 20-30 rooms, you could raise money with the donations you get to pay for them to stay there for a little while, give them food, then maybe help them find a new life so they can afford money to get food and house on their own. Just an idea.
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