MOLLY’S STORY: How One Blogger Saw Neighbors in Need and Got Involved

Learn more about Molly from The Snyder 5 as she guests blogs about her experience as a  Child Hunger Ends Here blogger correspondent.

When I first was asked to join in the ConAgra Foods Child Hunger Ends Here campaign I didn’t pause. I didn’t stop to think. I just knew. Yes. I had to do it. I wanted to do it.

I lived in Chicago for about ten years. It’s impossible, living there, not to see faces of hunger daily. But you didn’t often see the children. You knew they were there, but it wasn’t their faces you were seeing every day.

However, I think, in my mind, I imagined them. I could picture, I thought, their lives. Their worlds.

As I began to work on this program I realized that while the images I had seen and pictured were very real. They were not the only ones.

Hunger doesn’t have a universal look. Hunger doesn’t have a universal story.

That struck me the most when I was looking at the statistics for my children’s school district’s free and reduced lunch program. Nearly seventy percent of the children in our district are eligible for that program. Seventy percent.

I really, finally, got it. Hunger doesn’t have a look. It doesn’t have a pattern or a path. But it is a huge staggering problem. One that is affecting families who are, literally, in my neighborhood.

To try to do something, I organized a giant rummage sale among Minnesota bloggers. Nearly 30 families volunteered their time and donated their things.  And after one day of standing together to do something about it, we raised nearly $1,000 to donate to Feeding America.

Reflecting on it, one of my friends mentioned that the reality was that each of those 30 families could have just donated $35 and we would have accomplished the same thing financially. But what we did, I think, is far more than that. We came together. We used our voices – online and off – to shed some light on this issues that is affecting our community and all communities. We fought child hunger.