I received an email from a reader who wanted to share a few ways to show solidarity during Lent, with all our fellow human beings who face hunger every day.
Here are her suggestions:
1) Serve plain meatless sandwich and soup dinners 1-2x /week and explain to our children why we are doing this...
2) Try to live on the food stamp allowance equivalent to our family size throughout Lent...
3) Take the time to write a family letter once a week for the hunger advocacy of Bread for the World, eg.
4) Take any money saved from steps 1 & 2 & additional family offerings and sending it to such organizations as the local Food Banks, Oxfam, the Heifer Project, etc...
In our home, each day during Lent our children take an item from the pantry to give away to the poor. At the end of Lent we deliver the box to our local St. Vincent de Paul Food Pantry.
Please feel free to share any other ideas you may have in the comments!
Interesting post. Here's a link to calculate your family's food stamp allowance.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.ndhealth.gov/dhs/foodstampCalculator.asp
I've never considered how difficult this might be (in actual dollars and cents), so it's an eye opener.
Just happened across your blog! Excellent!! Will surely do some of the recipes you have listed and will be creating a link on my blog to yours! God Bless! Happy Fasting!
ReplyDeleteThe food stamp idea is very interesting. I looked up our food stamp allowance on my own and then also used Suzie's link. Both amounts were just a couple dollars more than $1000. For real? This baffles me because we only spend between 500-600 a month on groceries including paper products.
ReplyDeleteAmen to Jen...and we are a family of 5...a 13yo'ds we lovingly refer to as the 'garbage can', a 9yo ds, who is itching to take his brothers place in the eating arena, and dd8.5 who has Down syndrome and loves to eat whatever everyone else has!
ReplyDeleteI would flourish with a food stamp budget of $1000!! Our NON FOOD STAMP BUDGET is closer to Jen's 500-600 max!
Juliette
Only a person with no income would receive the full amount of food stamps. The second a person is working, their food is cut drastically. Cut far more than they are earning, in fact. So a family with one person working minimum wage might only receive $150 per month instead of $1000. It's a big part of why people would rather not work. Any attempt to help themselves is severely punished with loss of the very services that would allow them to work.
ReplyDelete