NAWILIWILI — With costs of housing, rents, utilities, gas, medical care, insurance and food all soaring on the island, families with expenses rising faster than incomes can keep up find themselves in binds. The Kauai Food Bank provides a critical
NAWILIWILI — With costs of housing, rents, utilities, gas, medical care, insurance and food all soaring on the island, families with expenses rising faster than incomes can keep up find themselves in binds.
The Kauai Food Bank provides a critical safety net so that families don’t have to choose between paying the electric bill or buying food for their children, said Judy Lenthall, executive director.
The food bank continues to feed roughly 6,000 Kauaians a month, half of them children and 25 percent of them elderly, she said.
And 2003 “was a big year for food distribution,” with 9,000 people fed in November of last year, and 7,500 in December. In January of this year, 5,500 people enjoyed food from the food bank.
So is the backdrop for the 10th annual healthy food and fund drive of the food bank, again with a goal of gathering 20,000 pounds of food and $20,000 in donations.
For every $1 donated, food bank officials through connections with the Hawaii Food Bank and America’s Second Harvest can purchase $16 worth of food.
Bags for placing non-perishable food items in, and envelopes for check donations, are including in today’s issue of The Garden Island, and were distributed in yesterday’s Island Shopper.
The drive runs through Friday, April 30, and food may be dropped off at any county fire station, or the Nawiliwili food bank warehouse. Checks may be placed in the postage-paid envelopes and dropped in the mail.
But the burden of raising $20,000 doesn’t all fall onto the shoulders of Kauaians. Once again this year, multi-millionaire Alan Shawn Feinstein of Cranston, R.I. has pledged to match dollar for dollar a certain portion of cash donated to the food bank during the drive.
For the past six years, he has been giving away $1 million a year to agencies across the country helping to fight hunger.
Why?
“Because we were each put here on earth to do what we can to help those in need,” he said.
“We do get money from him every year,” Lenthall said.
This year, he is even donating money to schools which raise the most money and collect the most donated food for the food bank, based on school size (per-capita). Each Kaua‘i schools has the chance to win $1,000 in the drive.
Local businesses are getting involved, too. Operators of Curves for Women, a health facility, will waive the normal registration fee for women who bring in bags of food, Lenthall said.
Volunteers with the Rotary Club of Kauai, and family members and friends, stapled 10,000 envelopes to bags at the Lihue Neighborhood Center, in the record time of two hours.
It was so much fun that some of the young ones suggested an un-stapling party so that they could then re-staple the envelopes to bags, Lenthall said with a chuckle.
In the works, pending a successful grant-writing application, is a Kids Cafe, to be established at the Boys & Girls Club of Hawaii-Waimea.
It will offer healthy snacks to youngsters after school in the structured setting of the Waimea clubhouse near Waimea High School, where there is room in a fenced-in, grassed area for the children also to grow some of their own food, she said.
Officials at the Kauai Children’s Discovery Museum will assist with establishment of educational programs including nutrition programs, mentoring, and instructing the young ones on how to build and use a solar-powered oven.
Hunger, or not eating right, Lenthall concluded, leads to health problems which lead to employment problems and other problems down the line.
For more information, please call 246-3809.
Associate Editor Paul C. Curtis may be reached at 245-3681 (ext. 224) or mailto:pcurtis@pulitzer.net.
