Blog

All of us have important women in our lives—mothers, spouses, partners, grandmothers and wonderful female friends. This year, the Ceres Society is spearheading a Mother’s Day campaign to honor these special women and also help to end hunger in our community. As Ceres Co-Chair, I hope that you will join me in this initiative. According to a recent study by Feeding America, there are more than 210,000 children in the Delaware Valley that are food insecure. As a mother myself (of both a son and a daughter), the thought that there are mothers in    the Philadelphia area who have to let their children ...

In September of 2012 Philabundance officially launched a Children’s Initiative, Kids Bites.  Now six months into the pilot program, a partnership with Target’s Meals for Minds, hungry kids and families of Lowell Elementary are getting much needed nutritious foods to take home. Each month families receive about 25 pounds of food, double that if they have three or more students enrolled at the school. The menu rotates, but 30% of the items are always seasonal fresh produce.  Milk and 100% juice are always available, and the remaining non-perishable products vary with things like peanut butter and jelly, pasta, brown rice, cereal, ...

  Spread The Love is here, and in honor of this drive for jars of peanut butter and jelly, I’m sharing my favorite PB recipes. Peanuts have been valued for their addition to a healthy diet since the Aztecs, hundreds of years ago.  They have a high level of monounsaturated fats and reservatrol. Peanut butter (and peanuts) provide protein, vitamins, fiber and high levels of the antioxidant p-coumaric acid.  As a kid, I grew up eating PB&J sandwiches all the time as well as my Mom’s fresh baked peanut butter cookies.  But it wasn’t until a trip to Colonial Williamsburg, when I ...

Somehow in thirty some-odd years living on this planet, I managed to be one of the few people on earth not to read (or at least begin, and promptly set aside) Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, one of the great tomes of American Literature. I was able to right this wrong, when my wife presented me with a copy this Christmas, and I quickly dove in (pun intended). As I progressed through the pages of blubber, spermaceti, and coffin-shaped buoys through the New Year I couldn’t help to draw the comparisons every time I looked up from my book at CSPAN, covering the fiscal ...

  I am affiliated as an officer and secretary of Community Service Corps for Archbishop Wood High School. Through my first-hand experience with the Great Food Fight, I had the opportunity to go to the Philabundance warehouse and see what it is like. Members of our Delaware Valley Area are very generous and giving. Philabundance does extraordinary work for the community, and I am proud to be a part of it. As a student, my school has helped efforts through various incentives. One teacher gave students homework passes if they donated a certain number of nonperishable foods. Once a month, Archbishop Wood holds a ...

From holiday gatherings and Christmas dinners to New Year’s Eve parties – I've prepared more than my share of meals from leftovers.  I've made everything from traditional sandwiches and soups to even shepherd’s pie, but my favorite is one of the easiest and surest ways to please everyone in the family: Holiday Pot Pie. Growing up, my Mom made pot pies from scratch often, but nowadays I like to let everyone customize individual pot pies to their own tastes by setting up a mini buffet with lots of choices. The Filling I set out leftover roasted ham, green beans, roasted sweet potatoes, mushrooms, ...

  When my husband, Chip, passed away unexpectedly on May 21, 2009 at the age of 43, I was devastated.  Having spent 26 years together, I felt lost without him. As I was driving to work on December 4, 2009, I was trying to come up with a way to make my children’s first Christmas without their dad a happy one.  I turned on the radio and heard Jon Bon Jovi’s voice.  It was the last day of Preston and Steve’s Campout for Hunger and Jon was offering 4 tickets to an upcoming show, a meet and greet with him and a ...

  Yesterday we released a difficult, yet urgent call to the public: Philabundance is currently experiencing a critical dry food shortage, and we need your help now more than ever as we try to meet the needs of this growing demand. The response was overwhelming as we received immediate donations from longtime and new supporters alike, valued partners such as FreshDirect, and devoted volunteers. Of the many warming contributions, we wanted to share with you this particularly inspiring appeal from our friend and fellow hunger fighter, the talented Chef Robert Irvine (The Food Network, The Next Iron Chef, Dinner: Impossible). We thank Chef Irvine, as well as our ...

Hello! My name is Brittany Campese and I am happy to introduce myself as the new Senior Manager of Volunteers at Philabundance. I have had the pleasure of interfacing with many of you throughout my first two months here, and I look forward to meeting even more of our valued volunteers and partners throughout the upcoming months. I come to Philabundance with a Master of Nonprofit Degree and over 10 years of experience working with nonprofit organizations of all missions and sizes across the U.S. Getting to know the staff, programs, volunteers, and partners of Philabundance has been an exciting ...

How many families would $187.50 feed?  Recently my teenage son and I were looking at back to school clothes.  He saw a pair of designer pants that cost $187.50 and said that he “really” wanted them for the first day of school. I was appalled. With families and individuals who are struggling to put food on their table, we sat down to talk about what this amount represented to those that don’t have a way to feed their children or themselves some days. Just this week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture released figures for those without enough food to eat as well ...