257th Week Update - Miles Neighborhood One Can A Week Project

Why We Believe One Can A Week

Will End Hunger

The "We" includes volunteers and participants

Right from the beginning, One Can A Week had a duel purpose: Collect food for the Community Food Bank and engage as many people as possible in the struggle to feed hungry parents and their kids. (The statistics that follow are all approximates based on current information available.)

There are 313 million Americans and 15% or 46 million folks are food insecure. They are not sure when or from where their next meal might be coming. This means 267 million people are in various stages of being food secure, depending on how much money they have in their checking accounts.

Those 267 million people are One Can A Week’s market. And based on the participation rates in the Miles Neighborhood, there is a likelihood that 133.5 million or 50% of the country’s population will eventually participate in a One Can A Week program either in a neighborhood or at local supermarket. This might mean, with one can weighing one pound, we could collect 133.5 million pounds of food a week. At the end of 52 week we would have nearly 7 billion pounds of food.

Add that to the 2.57 billion Feeding America collected in 2012 and we will have almost 10 billion pounds of food.

On the hungry side of the equation, the 46 million food insure Americans (kids and their parents) require over 65 billion pounds of food a year to make three nutritious meals a day.  Here’s the math: 46 million x 3 meals a day x 1.3 lbs. per meal = 179.4 million pounds per day x 365 days.)

Even if we covered just one meal a day, that would be 21.6 billion pounds, nowhere near the amount collected by Feeding America, One Can A Week in the future or the federal government’s billions of dollars spent on food programs.

Living Wage and Greed  

The underlying core of One Can A Week—collecting food weekly and creating community—is the real solution to poverty and hunger in America. The more citizens engage in making our country into a land of opportunity for everyone, the more they will see that we must view the making of money as we do every other endeavor. If a person can throw a baseball (top executives included) we don’t chide him or her every second of the day about why he or she is not playing in the major leagues.

Yet if a person is cooking hamburgers in McDonalds or waiting tables at the Olive Garden—two very important jobs, by the way, especially if you are hungry—what sense does it make to say they should be earning more money when their wages are governed by minimums?

It is incredibly faulty logic to think that if one has the skill to do a task, such as throw a baseball, he or she should be a major league baseball player. The fact is, making really good money in any profession requires a finely honed set of skills and knowledge and it is no surprise that only 1% of our population can do that.

Our vision, our belief is, with millions of rich and poor citizens involved in One Can A Week, a logical and ethical community movement will emerge to encourage everyone to think that a living wage and so much less greed* is the only future our children and their children should inherit.

*To see and then understand how much greed is swallowing up our country, please click on the link to view the sobering video on the actual distribution of wealth in America.   

The 17^th Truck Load

Sprouts passed a milestone Saturday. Their customers donated their first ton of food and it took just 22 weeks to reach that mark with an average weekly donation of 92.4 lbs. The donation this week was 100 lbs. even, so they are already heading for a record time to donate the next 2,000 lbs.

  

This week’s donations amounted to 514 lbs. and included River View Estates, 132 lbs.;  Sprouts (Speedway), 100 lbs.; Shiva Vista, 64 lbs.; Ward 6, 82 lbs. and Miles Neighborhood, 136 lbs.

More Sprouts News

Monday Sprouts Management in Phoenix rotated all the managers in the Tucson market. Richard Rodriguez is now at Oracle and Magee while Theresa Hippler from Broadway manages the Speedway supermarket.

After meeting Theresa on Thursday all my concerns were laid to rest. We’re happily pressing on and in a month or so she would like to see One Can A Week set up at Broadway. Now I know two great managers at Sprouts who like One Can A Week.

We collected a total of 136 lbs. of food. The money we donated amounted to $33.25, a $25.00 check and $8.25 in cash.

See you Sunday,

Peter