Today, I had the pleasure of conducting a site visit at the Fort Washington Food Pantry, located at and administered by Saint John’s Episcopal Church in Fort Washington, MD. The Fort Washington Food Pantry has been in existence for more than 20 years. I have been an Outreach Coordinator at the food bank for three years and have conducted over 180 site visits, yet I continue to be impressed by the generosity of the wonderful volunteers who often coordinate these feeding programs.
But today was different. While I was touched by the generosity, love and care they put into the pantry; this wasn’t the most impressive quality I found at the pantry. Nor was it the fact that they feed 7,155 people a year providing 12 pounds of food during each visit, are a client choice pantry, are in the process of moving into a new space in the building to accommodate more shelving, and will potentially open one more day a week. What impressed me the most is that they knew the value of one dollar.
Currently, to feed the 7,155 people a year they serve, the pantry spends $5,451 annually. If you break that down it takes them roughly $0.76 to feed one person or $3.80 to feed a family of four a year! Some of us spend more than $3.80 on our favorite smoothie or coffee drink. As a partner agency of the food bank, they are able to stretch their dollars to serve over 7,000 people each year! This renewed my hope that if all of us in the Washington metro region give just a little bit more, we can feed the more than 600,000 people in this region that are affected by hunger!
Please click here to learn more about the Fort Washington Food Pantry.