CHARLESTON – Monongalia County Schools put out a holiday spread, as it were, three days before Thanksgiving last month.
The district oversaw a food giveaway, no questions asked, with boxes of bulk-sized cans of beef, chicken and vegetables, obtained through a commodity unit of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“We just want to be able to help people,” said Brian Kiehl, the school district’s director of child nutrition services who acquired the food and organized the event.
Even in relatively prosperous Mon County, kids go to bed with growling bellies – which is a direct result of food insecurity. To be “food insecure” means you’re literally not getting enough to eat, in order to sustain yourself nutritionally.
Because food insecurity is a chronic condition across the Mountain State, the West Virginia Association of Counties is making cash donations to two of the larger food banks serving citizens and households here.
Greg Vandall, the association’s president, said offerings of $5,000 apiece are going to the Facing Hunger Food Bank in Huntington and Gassaway’s Mountaineer Food Bank – whose trucks are a familiar presence in north-central West Virginia.
The gifts, Vandall said, are in response to “recent federal government disruptions” that put additional stresses onto already strapped food banks and other charitable groups in West Virginia.
“We’re proud to support the organizations doing the heavy lifting,” he said. “In this time of the year, no one should go hungry.”
In West Virginia, however, people – young and old – don’t just go hungry this time of the year.
According to the watchdog group Feeding America, they’re hungry with every turn of the calendar page.
Of the more than 11,000 students enrolled in Mon’s schools last year, 20% of them – that’s 2,240 students – experienced food insecurity, Feeding America said.
Seniors barely getting by add to the malaise, said Agnes Queen, a past president of the association of counties.
Fifty-two of West Virginia’s 55 counties, in fact, have a higher-than-average senior population, Queen reports, and that’s a demographic, she said, already mired in poverty or near-poverty, as the economic benchmarks go.
That’s why she encourages West Virginians to donate to their local food pantries of choice. Visit www.wvaoc.org to learn more about how you can do just that.
“Small actions, multiplied across the state,” she said, “can make a real difference.”
