A Day to Give Back

On a humid Friday morning, as the city of Chicago starts to bustle with summer activity, the Feeding America national office is unusually quiet. Empty meeting rooms and quiet hallways are actually the byproduct of some office-wide hooky, but the plotting of Ferris Bueller (or like-minded employees) can’t be blamed. Instead, it’s the annual Day of Impact, when office staff take the opportunity to volunteer in the community and interact with the people we serve. To reconnect with the face of hunger. So we venture out to food pantries and mobile sites across the city, don gloves, bag produce, carry grocery bags and break down pallets.

On the morning of the event, we navigate to a neighborhood in southwest Chicago, we approach our volunteer site: a mobile produce pantry functioning like a pop-up farmer’s market. As we pull up to the curb, a sobering visual places the urgency of hunger relief front and center. Hundreds of people line the street, having traveled by public transportation, in family vans or on foot to wait in the stifling heat. In under two hours, we will distribute tens of thousands of pounds in squash, celery, cucumbers, cabbage, lettuce, strawberries and bread.

The faces that trickle past me, accepting bags of produce with a kind word and a smile, represent all ages and walks of life. In the United States, the face of hunger transcends cultural, generational and ethnic boundaries. Hunger is pervasive, and that simple fact is laid bare during our volunteer morning. Even in this predominantly Hispanic neighborhood, food insecurity crosses language barriers and impacts more than one identity or interest group. It affects the father balancing professional and personal commitments. The college student weighed down by debt. The young mom weighed down – quite literally – by the toddler at her side and the baby on her chest. The long-time best friends whose bags grow too heavy to carry. The family matriarch who waits an extra hour in the sun, just to take surplus strawberries back to her growing grandchildren at home.