This fall, as it has for more than a decade, the Mitzvah Food Project is combatting hunger by running its annual High Holiday Food Drive, the Jewish community’s largest, most important coordinated food collection effort of the year.
With a quarter of the region’s population falling under the poverty line and over 11,000 area Jewish households living with food insecurity, it is not surprising that Philadelphia is one of the hungriest cities in the United States. But these people are more than a statistic. They are people like Claudia, a single mom of three boys and cancer survivor, who suffers from a debilitating condition that prevents her from working and sometimes from even leaving the house to go food shopping. Claudia depends on her twice-a-month food deliveries from the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia’s Mitzvah Food Project to feed her family. The fresh produce also helps her stay healthy.
Claudia, who has been a client of the Mitzvah Food Project since 1999, is incredibly grateful for the help she receives. “It’s been really tough and the Jewish community has become our family and we feel like we have a lot of support,” she said. “We honestly feel like we have support from the community and we have a family and the kids are not as scared and they don’t feel as alone. People helped us in every which way: bringing the food, people would actually help us prepare it when I was really sick and in the ICU, so it’s helped tremendously and I want to thank everyone that’s been part of it.”
This fall, as it has for more than a decade, the Mitzvah Food Project is combatting hunger by running its annual High Holiday Food Drive, the Jewish community’s largest, most important coordinated food collection effort of the year. Over 40 synagogues and organizations around Greater Philadelphia will participate in this initiative, collecting canned protein items including kosher canned beans, nut butters and canned fish.
“This food drive supplements our Mitzvah Food Project for roughly four months and without it our food costs would increase in excess of $40,000 per year,” said Brian Gralnick, director of the Jewish Federation’s Center for Social Responsibility. “This partnership during the holidays to help those less fortunate is a great example of the collective impact we can have as a community.”
Last year, the High Holiday Food Drive collected 42,000 pounds of food. “The food drive brings in much-needed donations that help the Mitzvah Food Project stretch its budget further. The diverse donations give clients more items to choose from when they come to our five food pantries,” explained Deirdre Mulligan, Mitzvah Food Project manager. This year, the Mitzvah Food Project hopes to collect 50,000 pounds of usable food so it can continue to feed more than 3,000 families in need, like Claudia’s, each year.
Following the High Holiday Food Drive, the Jewish Federation’s Women’s Philanthropy group will host the Big Food Sort on Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2015, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Volunteers will sort all of the collected food at the SHARE warehouse, 2901 West Hunting Park Avenue in Philadelphia. To register, visit jewishphilly.org/wpshare.
The Mitzvah Food Project was piloted in 1996 to alleviate hunger and malnutrition among at-risk families in Greater Philadelphia. With broad-based support from the region’s Jewish community and hunger relief agencies, the Food Project, which initially distributed food through a single community site, has expanded its geographic reach throughout Philadelphia and into the region’s lower-income suburban neighborhoods.
To learn more about the High Holiday Food Drive, visit www.jewishphilly.org/fooddrive or contact Talia Lev, Mitzvah Food Project Coordinator, at (215) 832-0815 or foodproject@jfgp.org.
