On June 20^th the United Way of Bucks County will hold it’s second annual Bucks Knocks Out Hunger event at Delaware Valley College. We spoke with Jamie Haddon, President and CEO of the UW of Bucks and here’s what he had to say about how the event got started. “Post hurricane Sandy, in September two years ago, we came to realize that our food pantries in Bucks were empty”.  This was an especially difficult time for that as the summer tends to get the least amount of donations, since families are busy with vacations and prepping for the school year, and the need is greater with more children home from school and in need of food.  The following Martin Luther King Jr. day, an event was held and 23,000 meals were packaged in 1 hour and 15 minutes.  “We thought, wow that was easy” says Haddon of the MLK event and that sparked the start of BKO Hunger.

Most people don’t realize that although we live in a beautiful and seemingly affluent area of the world there are still 64,000 people, including 15% of Bucks County children who are food insecure.  According to Jamie Haddon, “Food insecure means that those are people who, because of job loss or some other misfortune, don’t know where their next meal is coming from”.

The BKO Hunger event last year was a great success blowing the original goal of $16,000.00 to provide 64,000 meals out of the water by raising a stunning $51,000.00 and packaging 100,000 meals.  They also are committed to providing something that is extremely rare in food pantries but so vital to our health and nutrition, fresh produce. This year Jamie explained that the United Way wants to continue to grow the event and says that they see it as having branches like a tree.  One branch is the money raised and the meals packaged, another is a continued partnership with Rolling Harvest, a group of volunteers that go to local farms to pick the crops that farmers leave behind to provide local pantries with fruits and vegetables, and yet another branch is a partnership with the Del Val College Agriculture program.  Through funds raised the UW of Bucks has secured 3.5 acres of land on the campus plus parts of their green houses in hopes to provide fresh produce to those in need in Bucks County throughout the year.

So how can you help?  “We are still in need of 80 volunteers at this point” says Haddon.  Those volunteers can either package food on the 20^th for 1.5 hours starting at either 8am or 10am or they can participate in the crop gathering in the field which is a 3 hour shift one starting at 8am and the other at 1pm.  If you are not able to help physically on the 20^th you can contact the United Way for volunteer opportunities throughout the year and because of their partnership with Del Val you could learn some tricks of the gardening trade from top experts in the field like Dean Russell C. Redding, former PA Department of Agriculture Secretary.  Lastly and certainly not least you can make a monetary donation to the effort.  “The average donation is $25 dollars which, at 25 cents a meal will provide 100 meals to those in need” says Haddon.  That said, with a little over a week left and still $20,000.00 from goal, no donation is too big or too small!

To Donate or sign up to volunteer you can visit the website:

http://www.uwbucks.org/bkohunger/

You can also mail a check made payable to the United Way of Bucks County, make sure to put BKO Hunger in the memo and send to: 413 Hood Blvd Fairless Hills PA 19030

Or you can stop by any Univest Bank to drop off a donation.

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