F-to-F Adds 16th Receiving Community -- Bed-Stuy, New York
We’re happy to announce that Family-to-Family will soon begin supporting families in the Brooklyn, New York inner-city community of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Our community partner there is The BedStuy Campaign Against Hunger food pantry (www.bedstuycampaignagainsthunger.com), a pantry that feeds 6,000 impoverished Brooklyn residents every month.

The Reverend Melony Samuels is BSCAH’s executive director, and she says that with food and energy prices skyrocketing, the number of new families visiting the pantry has risen by almost 30% in the last year. She reports that many of those new families are the working poor -- people who do have jobs, but are no longer able to make ends meet. Compounding the problem is the fact that food supplies to the pantry are down by 25% due to a decrease in federal and local funding.

As a result, Reverend Samuels was forced to turn away 800 people in need of food in the last year, and she says those who do get food are leaving the pantry with less than they used to. (Photo: Matias Echanove http://urbanology.org/BedStuy/)

New “Sponsor a Family” Program
The Bed-Stuy community will be part of a new way of donating offered by Family-to-Family. People who contact us wanting to sponsor a family who are not located near an existing chapter will be able to pay online on the F-to-F website with a credit card, for one food box a month for 12 months. We’ll link them with a specific Bed-Stuy family, and the food box they purchase will be delivered to the BedStuy Campaign Against Hunger food pantry by a local grocery store for their family to pick up. We’ll also be using this new protocol option in Montrose, Arkansas…in Crownpoint, New Mexico and in Lemmon, South Dakota.

Pam Visits Myra, Kentucky
Pam and her 21 year old daughter Olivia spent the first weekend in May visiting the Appalachian community of Myra, Kentucky, where they met F-to-F community partner Lois Tackett for the first time. Lois, who runs the Manna From Heaven food pantry in Myra, organized a “Community Day” on Saturday May 3rd that brought together people from both the Myra community and donors to Manna from Heaven from around the country to celebrate the agricultural and livestock farming ventures that Lois has started.

Over the course of the day, in addition to clothing and a hot meal, Lois gave out more than 8,000 vegetable seed packets, 200 baby chickens, 1,100 strawberry plants, 2,000 pairs of gardening gloves and 150 sets of gardening tools, all of which had been donated. The chickens were snapped up in the first hour, so Lois is keeping a waiting list of families that want chickens but didn’t get any this time around. Pam has already purchased 300 baby chickens for Myra – all of which have been given away -- and plans to send more since there is such a demand.

Lois’ hope is that families in the area who don’t have enough to eat will be able to raise the chickens for both meat and eggs, and grow their own vegetables as well. Lois and her husband Ralph have also started a “community garden” – tended by volunteers, in the hopes of increasing the food supply for the many families that visit the pantry.

A local Hazard, Kentucky TV station (WYMT-TV) covered the event, and if you click on this link you can watch the video of the piece they aired about Manna From Heaven on their May 3rd 6:00 news.

Pam also met some of the F-to-F receiving families, and will write up her impressions/thoughts about the trip, which she’ll forward soon to our Myra donating families.

Other Community Updates
Lake Providence, Louisiana
Sister Karen of East Carroll Parish writes, “Here in Lake Providence, the Wilson family will have a unique experience on Sunday, May 18th. Ashley, Beverly and Curtis (triplets) will be graduating from Lake Providence High School. All 3 are college bound, Curtis in Computer Science and both Ashley and Beverly in the Fine Arts area.” She adds, “Triplets graduating is very unusual for this town of a little less than 5,000.”

Lemmon, South Dakota
“Spring in Lemmon has been very slow coming. Our trees have not budded out yet. We are now going into the 8th year of drought. Dams, creeks and small lakes are dry and our nearby manmade lake is the lowest in its history. We did not get snow throughout winter and that is about the only way we can make up the terrific water loss. Many ranchers are hanging on by a shoestring and praying for rain. Join us in that plea to God for moisture. Gas and food prices continue to climb and everyone is feeling the pinch.” - Florence Hoff, Lemmon Community Food Pantry

Thoreau, New Mexico
Kathy Spitz, director of “Eastern Navajo Child Drive”, Family-to-Family’s coordinating organization in Thoreau, New Mexico, sent us an update that should have been included in our last newsletter, but was accidentally omitted. We’re including it now, with apologies to Kathy. She wrote, “Child Drive 2007 (Eastern Navajo Child Drive’s annual Christmas food and gift basket drive) was the best ever! We delivered to each of our 280 families a holiday basket of food with a fleece, along with all the special gifts, wrapped and tagged for 650 of our children. (That’s 30 more families and 32 more children than 2006!) Smiles and thanks were everywhere!

“We were able to focus on our Grandparents through the ingenuity & generosity of several folks from Family-to-Family by obtaining more blankets below cost.

“Our 107 sponsors, (39 are NEW!) are UP 34% from 2006! We believe our website, www.navajochild.org as well as our new partnership with Family-to-Family are directly responsible for attracting so many new sponsors. Our thanks go to John Brandt, ME for designing and maintaining our site & Pam Koner for providing many new opportunities through F-to-F ‘Angels’. We raised $16, 417 (a 17% increase over 2006 and an all time high) and received boxes of toys, clothing, books, sports items & blankets. We ended the season with $1,064.66 in our account. A bit short for emergency funds for food & wood as well as saving at post/pre-sales; but we are hopeful for continued support throughout the year…. You are very special to our children, their families, & us. Our heart-felt thanks are sent your way.”

The F-to-F Hunger Relief Registry: An Online Solution to Hunger
With larger numbers of American families showing up at food pantries every day… and with more and more of those pantries reporting severe food shortages, Pam and the Reverend Melony Samuels, the director of Brooklyn, New York’s BedStuy Campaign Against Hunger food pantry, have come up with what they hope will be a partial solution to the crisis: the creation of an on-line registry linking people who need food with individual donors.

Based loosely on the Family-to-Family model, families or individuals who need food will sign up on the registry website (this will be a separate website from the Family-to-Family website) at their local food pantry. Interested donors will also go online to the website, where they’ll be able to choose a type of family to help… and pay with a credit card for one box of food a month for 12 months. Family-to-Family will then assign a particular family to them. The food for that family will be purchased from either a local food bank or a private company, which will box and deliver the food to the food pantry….where those families will pick up their boxes.

The registry’s website will also include a “Family Postings” webpage so that donor and recipient families can correspond… the online equivalent of F-to-F’s letter writing component. Sponsored families will write to their donor families each month from a computer at the food pantry when they pick up their box… and a food pantry caseworker will be on hand to help them. Sponsoring families or individuals will also have a “homepage” on the website… all of which should ensure a strong communication link between sponsored and sponsoring families.

(Although we are planning to initially pilot this idea in our new Brooklyn, New York receiving community, with families from the BedStuy Campaign Against Hunger food pantry, it is a separate program from the new “Sponsor a Family” idea outlined at the top of the newsletter.) We hope to eventually broaden The Family-to-Family Hunger Relief Registry’s reach to families at food pantries across the country.

For more information about food pantry shortages, click on any of the following links:

1. Bill Moyers Journal - Transcripts – PBS,
2. Food Banks Come Up Short – ABC News
3. Supplies Dwindle at Food Pantries as Financing Bill Stalls in Washington – New York Times.

Family-to-Family is Finalist for Stockholm Challenge Award!
Family-to-Family’s hunger relief program has been chosen as one of 19 finalists in the health category of the Stockholm Challenge Award – a prestigious international award given to one development project in each of six categories that use information technology in an innovative and inspirational way. The finalists are being judged by 25 ICT experts, and the winners in each category will be announced at Stockholm City Hall in Stockholm, Sweden (best known as the venue for the Nobel Prize award banquet) on May 22nd. All Stockholm Challenge finalists are invited to Sweden to attend the prize ceremony, as well as to share their knowledge and expertise during the week leading up to the ceremony during a series of workshops and conferences focused on discussing new ways of using information technology.

Although neither Pam nor the other members of the F-to-F board can attend the ceremony, we do have a stand-in… A friend of Pam’s who lives in Sweden will represent us there. In addition to world-wide recognition, the winners will receive a trophy and 5,000 euros – approximately $7,500.

Watch Profile of Family-to-Family on TV – May 18th
On Sunday, May 18th, the new Direct TV series “Hometown Heroes” will air its profile of Family-to-Family, featuring the Mary Kay Woodruff family of Edgewood, Kentucky and their sponsored Pembroke, Illinois family, Iris White and her grandchildren. The two families met in person for the first time in Pembroke last fall and Direct TV was there to film their meeting. In October we printed a letter Mary Kay Woodruff wrote describing her Pembroke visit… here’s a brief excerpt:

“…You could see glimpses of what appeared to be a home, but you weren't sure because of the boarded up windows or burned out roofs, or plastic covering the windows. You didn't think anyone could live back here until you saw a child walking up the road or small groups of dogs running together or men standing around… which appeared to be families living on the same property and burning their garbage because they couldn’t afford to have it picked up. We saw a boarded up school. This is where my heart sank and my kids were totally quiet. This is the time where the reality of what we do really hit.” – Mary Kay Woodruff

The Family-to-Family segment is the first piece in the show, airing at 9pm Eastern and Pacific time, 8pm Central time. Click here to view a promo of the series. For anyone who isn’t able to see the May 18th show, we plan to put the piece onto the F-to-F website after it airs, so you can watch it then.

More Birthday Buddies and Giving Parties to Report
We keep getting emails from people interested in making birthday buddies boxes; as a result we’ve expanded the program to include families in our Washington County, Maine receiving community. We’ve also gotten news of a number of birthday giving parties in the last few months, so we thought we’d share a few pictures with you that were shared with us! These beautiful boxes are from a 12 year old girl from Waccabuc, New York’s birthday giving party; the girls at the party made 10 boxes which they sent to children in Pembroke, Illinois.

Community Profile – Jackson, Mississippi
Interview with Cynthia McLaurin
Written by MJ Territo

Compared with many Family-to-Family communities, Jackson, Mississippi is a big, bustling place. It is the state capital, a destination for conferences and conventions, has a thriving arts scene, and is well-known as the home town of civil rights activist Medgar Evers and writer Eudora Welty. But the problems receiving families face here would be easily recognized in smaller, more isolated communities.

Public transport is infrequent and spotty, so owning a car is necessary to get to and from work. But Cynthia McLaurin, F-to-F coordinator at the Jackson Revival Center Church, says many people can’t even afford a ‘hoop dee’, her name for an old car, nothing special, just something to get you from one place to another. Although Jackson does have some job opportunities in state government and in nationally known companies such as Nissan, Borden, and GE, Mississippi’s unemployment rate consistently rates among the highest in the nation. Most of the receiving families McLaurin and church pastor Steve Mitchell work with are employed at minimum wage, if they have work at all, and find it hard to make ends meet. F-to-F food boxes add an extra inch to their already tightly stretched budgets.

McLaurin’s special mission, she says, “is to try to meet the needs of people from 50 on up.” Living on fixed incomes and with medical expenses, life can difficult. Also, a number of F-to-F receiving families in Jackson are grandparents raising their grandchildren. Some of them are too frail to come down to the church to collect their boxes, so Pastor Steve delivers them. But with his other duties—Jackson Revival Center is an active church with many programs, including one that feeds 600 people a month—he finds it difficult to make more than one monthly visit. On a recent visit he sadly found that the grandmother heading one family had passed away and the children had been dispersed to other relatives.

Other families are doing better. Mrs. M. for instance, is raising 7 grandchildren, aged 7 through late teens. When the younger children were still at home with her Mrs. M. worked as a babysitter to support the family. And she is well-known in the neighborhood for helping out other families when they have illness or other troubles. Two sponsor families send boxes to Mrs. M. each month, and Mrs. M. or one of the children write to their sponsor families frequently.

McLaurin encourages receiving families to write to their sponsors. “If giving families can take the time to give, the receiving families should take the time to write,” she says. McLaurin has seen some relationships between families build to the point where they are not just corresponding through letters, but talking on the phone as well.

Family-to-Family is indeed helping, but the need in Jackson continues to be great. The feeding program that serves 600 people used to serve 800, but the church just can’t find the money and food supplies to reach that many people right now. There is also a waiting list for Family-to-Family participation. McLaurin screens receiving families carefully. “Show me you are helping yourself, and I’ll bend over backwards for you,” she vows.

As always, send us your news!

Best,
Pam and the Family-to-Family team
– written & edited by Nancy Hennessee

Family-to-Family is a recognized 501(c)(3)
Our US IRS tax ID number is 57-1169066

For more information, contact Pam Koner, Family-to-Family
Tel: 914-478-0756