A Round Up of Food Charities and Causes to Fight Hunger

Send A Postcard from the Hunger site

As we approach the annual Thanksgiving feast, there are more than 850 million people in the world who go hungry.  In developing countries, nearly 11 million children die every year from preventable and treatable, with 60% of these deaths from hunger and malnutrition.  I thought I'd highlight a few charitable organizations that are working to end hunger and some opportunities for donations.

The victims of Cyclone Sidr in the southwestern region of Bangladesh have immediate needs for relief items, including food and non-food items, emergency shelter, basic health care, clean water and more.  Network For Good has a round up charities you can donate to that are providing assistance.

Red Shoe Ramblings points to The Free Rice website, an interactive online game that will donate rice to the United Nations World Food Program when you click and play the game. You get a vocabulary word and you must choose the correct definition to make the donation. If you are correct, they give you a more difficult word.  Miss it and they’ll give you an easier one.


Fight Hunger us working to end child hunger by 2015 through a global day of awareness called Walk the World and other fund raising and action activities.  Take for example, Fight Hunger's Click to Feed a Child is similar to the rice game.   It also is a Facebook application that I can click on and it takes me over to the web site campaign where I can click and their sponsor donates .19 cents to the program.  My click was 1,417,507 .   Let's do the math on that one ... that's over $250,000.   (I also discovered a group called "I will donate $1 for every person that joins this group to Fight Hunger" which is being organized by some super activists high school kids.)


The Hunger Site promotes ways to help prevent hunger deaths every day and to help promote awareness through easy and quick online activities. With a simple, daily click of the yellow "Click Here to Give - it's FREE" button at The Hunger Site, visitors help provide food to those in need. Visitors pay nothing. Food is paid for by the site's sponsors and distributed by Mercy Corps worldwide and by America's Second Harvest to
food banks throughout the United States.

America's Second Harvest is the largest charitable hunger-relief organization in the United states.   It has a network of more than 200 member food banks and food-rescue organizations. The America's Second  Harvest Network secures and distributes more than 2 billion pounds of donated food and  grocery products annually. The America's  Second Harvest Network supports approximately 50,000 local charitable  agencies operating more than 94,000 programs including food pantries, soup  kitchens, emergency shelters, after-school programs, Kids  Cafes, Community Kitchens and BackPack Programs. 

Britt Bravo recommends two of her favorite food justice organizations, People's Grocery and Urban Sprouts - both organizations have embraced the social web to promote their missions and fundraise.  Food Gatherers provides food for the hungry by reducing food waster through the rescue and distribution of perishable and non-perishable food and other activities.

Comments

[DebR]

Hi Beth. This is a great list and I'm pleased to see you found the link I posted. Just wanted to mention though, my blog is Red Shoe Ramblings, not Red Show Ramblings. :-)

[Beth Kanter]

Fixed it! Thanks for the help spotting typos .. I'm bad at that

[Roger Carr]

Beth,
Thank you for providing this list of organizations. I "Stumbled" it to help get more people aware of ways they can help. Great post!

[Shaping Youth]

Beth, this is SUCH a great post, and I have to share that it became a big part of our media mix for Thanksgiving...

My middle-schooler earned 2000 grains of rice for WFP and probably lots of new words, yet also found a way to 'cheat' by tabbing an online dictionary at the same time as the difficulty increased, justified by her desire to 'do good things.'

This opens a new blogger conundrum on the ethical front---How would you handle such a dilemma? Curious.

p.s. She also LOVED your screenshot/Creative Commons show & tell from your second grader, so I need to blog that one for sure! Very inspiring. I think I need to interview you on all the attribution angles and 'what ifs' as I'm sure you could clarify some instances that aren't spelled out on the CC site.

[Living By Learning]

Great post! I recently wrote a post titled "Learning About Hunger" in which I mention several resources for teaching kids about hunger. I wish I had seen this article first because you list a few that I didn't know about. Thanks!