HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — Businesses are reopening and people are heading back to work, but that doesn't mean the need for food assistance has gone away. Groups in Huntsville are working together to meet that need.
Dozens of volunteers came out to the Legacy Center to organize and load up boxes of fresh produce and jugs of milk into trucks. The boxes are distributed all throughout the community.
Legacy Center Chief Visionary Officer Chanda Crutcher said, "Our target audience here at Legacy is older and disabled adults, but community we believe is the answer, and so we have partnered with over thirty churches and three non-profits to distribute over 60,000 pounds of food each week to our local community."
They say the need for food has grown tremendously since the pandemic. Now, with help from the USDA's Feed a Family Program, they're reaching at least 2,500 families every week.
"The first week that we were on the stay-at-home order, we realized that we had asked older adults to stay home and we were keeping visitors from them in many instances with no way to get food." said Crutcher. "We started with about 60 seniors on week one delivering food to their homes. Week two we were up to about 250. By week three, we learned about the USDA program and we were invited to be a part of that."
Representative Anthony Daniels came out to the food drive to lend a hand. He says a recent survey they conducted shows a lot of people in District 53 are going hungry.
"We want to make certain that those individuals that can't go back to work or have been missing out on a paycheck and living week to week or are on unemployment, we want to make sure we're doing what we can as a community to help them and let them know that we care, because they didn't create this pandemic," said Representative Daniels.
They will continue to hold these food drives every Wednesday for the next four weeks. Click here to find the closest distributor to you.
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