Thank you to the Girl Scouts of Minnesota and Wisconsin River Valleys for their donation of more than 60,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies through their “Buy 12 Give 12” campaign. For every case of cookies purchased between February 25–March 17, Girl Scouts River Valleys donated a case to the Second Harvest Heartland food shelf network.
For more information about the Girls Scouts of Minnesota and Wisconsin River Valleys, visit here.
Join us this Saturday, May 11, for Stamp Out Hunger!
Stamp Out Hunger is the nation’s largest single-day food drive, collecting more than 70 million pounds of food for food banks and food shelves across the United States. Locally, Second Harvest Heartland is the proud partner of Stamp Out Hunger with the National Association of Letter Carriers Minneapolis Branch 9 & Saint Paul Branch 28. This year, our goal is to collect 1.3 million pounds of food, enough for us to distribute 1 million meals to our agency partners in Central Minnesota and Western Wisconsin!
Get Involved!
1. Look for a blue bag in your mailbox or grab one during your next grocery run at Cub. Fill it with non-perishable, non-breakable food items and set it by your mailbox on Saturday, May 11. Your letter carrier will do the rest!
2. Stop by one of the participating Cub Foods locations on the day of the drive and drop your food off with our volunteers.
3. Donate online from May 1-14, 2013 & TCF Bank® will match $1:$1 up to a total of $25,000!
As the need for fresh, healthy food continues to grow; our new partnership with Bushel Boy Farms is both timely and exciting.
Bushel Boy Farms, located in Owatonna, Minnesota, grows premium tomatoes that are an essential selection at most Twin Cities grocery produce departments. Now, Channel One Food Bank—a food bank serving the area where Bushel Boy tomatoes are grown—and Second Harvest Heartland have access to healthy tomatoes that Bushel Boy generously provides to us.
Bushel Boy is pleased and proud to deliver these tomatoes that vary from their high premium-level standards and have us put them to good use. Thank you, Bushel Boy Farms, for your generous support of our local hunger-relief efforts!
One in six children in our community is not able to get enough food on a regular basis. That equates to thousands of hungry kids, especially during the summer when they don’t have access to school breakfast and lunch programs.
With your help, Second Harvest Heartland can continue to gather and deliver more food to our 1,000 agency partners serving kids and families, so they can return to school fully nourished and ready to learn. Just $1 allows us to provide up to $8 worth of food to a child in need.
Support Second Harvest Heartland and help provide for more kids in need by making a gift today at 2harvest.org/summerhunger.
The power of social media helped rev up the Saint Paul Auto Group’s annual “Drive Against Hunger” Food & Fund Drive this past holiday season because it helped us collect more than the weight of a vehicle in food. Over 6,900 pounds of food were gathered—providing over 5,700 meals to hungry community members—during the third consecutive food drive in support of Second Harvest Heartland.
Representatives from White Bear Mitsubishi Suzuki, Volkswagen of Inver Grove and Rydell Auto Outlet used Facebook, emails and even a TV commercial to collect food and financial donations from generous customers. Richard Herod III, general manager of White Bear Mitsubishi, even used his personal Facebook page to encourage friends to personally donate money toward the purchase of food for the drive.
“In one day on Facebook, I was able to encourage over $1,000 in donations from friends, family and customers. It turned into donation frenzy. The power of social media in this food drive was positively amazing,” Herod said.
The generosity and loyalty of Saint Paul Auto Group’s customer base mirrors the organization’s values. They make giving back to the community a priority, and one of their key values is to be a good community citizen. “Our vision is to be so effective that we are able to help others. Doing good things for the community supports this vision,” said Herod.
Local advertising agency, Martin Williams Advertising, is 414 pounds lighter today after wrapping up their annual “Biggest Loser” competition that raises funds for Second Harvest Heartland. Every year, the advertising agency challenges their employees to lose weight by exercising, eating better and leading healthier lives. For every pound lost, the company donates $5 to charity. This year, they raised and donated $2,500 to Second Harvest Heartland!
Over the last eight years, Martin Williams has provided over 60,000 meals through their “Biggest Loser” challenge.
Thank you Martin Williams for your creative and enthusiastic support of fighting hunger in our community!
Food Category: The partner with outstanding value and volume of donated food.
Edling Farms, a family-run potato grower in Clear Lake, Minnesota, has donated over 4 million pounds of potatoes to Second Harvest Heartland since 2003 and continues to be one of our largest suppliers of fresh food grown right here in the heartland.
Through generous donations, the growers helped spearhead a key initiative to efficiently collect excess produce, enabling Second Harvest Heartland and partners to provide locally grown, farm fresh food to our neighbors in need—and in turn, Edling Farms has help set an important example for growers and processors alike.
Innovation Category: The partner with unique vision and volume delivery of a program or product.
Six hundred thousand pounds of sweet corn made their way to hungry families last summer, thanks to the partnership of local food relief groups and corporations in a new food rescue pilot project.
Cargill, General Mills, Hunger-Free Minnesota, SUPERVALU and Seneca Foods Corporation came together in partnership with Second Harvest Heartland to provide transportation, equipment, warehouse space and financial support to rescue corn that would have otherwise gone to waste and deliver to those in need. This first-of-its-kind agricultural surplus initiative is planned to be repeated this year.
As the need for food assistance in our community continues to grow, your help is needed now more than ever. During the month of March, you can make a direct impact on your local food shelves and hungry neighbors through Minnesota FoodShare’s March Campaign.
For over 30 years, Minnesota FoodShare, a program of the Greater Minneapolis Council of Churches (GMCC), has coordinated the largest food and fund drive in the state, called the March Campaign. The campaign brings together thousands of families, companies, faith communities, schools and civic groups to raise a significant percentage of the annual food distributed by its recipient food shelves.
Food shelves rely heavily on the food and funds that come in during the March campaign—this year, the campaign is expected to raise half of the food that local food shelves will distribute in 2013.
To get there, we need your help. Food and financial donations are the easiest way to give, and all donations will go directly to local food shelves.
To find a food shelf near you to support, click here or call 651.291.0211. Or, if you’d like to support Second Harvest Heartland with a financial contribution to help us secure more food for our food shelf partners, click here.
Minnesota’s Connexus Energy is doing more than providing electricity. Three area food shelves—ACBC Food Shelf in Anoka, NACE Food Shelf in East Bethel and Family Pathways in Cambridge—recently received new walk-in coolers and freezers courtesy of the energy cooperative.
With the continued increase in food shelf visits month over month, the ability for these food shelves to accept more fresh and frozen food is invaluable for the communities they serve.
Thank you to Connexus Energy for your support of our community’s local hunger relief efforts!
Thanks to all who participated in yesterday’s Let’s Kick Hunger Day! We raised over $200,000 to kick hunger in Minnesota and western Wisconsin through generous donations and sponsor matches. And special thanks to WCCO Radio, Taste of the NFL, General Mills and Land O’Lakes for their continued partnership and support.
Let’s Kick Hunger Day raises crucial funds in support of hunger relief, 100 percent of which will stay local in our community. Times are tough for many of our neighbors, and the community’s support has never been more crucial.
If you missed the radiothon yesterday but still want to help kick hunger, you can still donate online here.
WCCO and Taste of the NFL present the fourth annual Let’s Kick Hunger Day tomorrow, a day-long event sponsored by Land O’Lakes and General Mills to benefit Second Harvest Heartland.
A record one in ten Minnesotans struggles to put food on the table every day, but you can help. Call in to WCCO at 877.866.4376 tomorrow or stop by the Mall of America Rotunda and become a Hunger Hero at $10 a month for a year. That provides a meal-a-day for the entire year for a child, working parent or senior in your community.
To get involved, call 877.866.4376 between 5am to 6pm, or click here to make a donation.
Mike Kothbauer, a longtime volunteer and supporter of Second Harvest Heartland, has volunteered in just about as many ways one could ever envision: He’s worked the phones at the Let’s Kick Hunger Day Radiothon; sorted, packed and labeled food; worked the assembly line; and now makes calls to seniors and others eligible for federal food assistance programs to remind them that their monthly box of food is ready for pick up.
Like many of our volunteers, Mike started volunteering at Second Harvest Heartland through his employer, Land O’Lakes. And now that he is retired, he still participates in community service through Land O’Lakes’ retiree volunteer program, a service-focused program for retirees to stay active and involved in their community.
And stay active Mike does—for the last two years, Mike has donated over 100 hours of volunteer service to Second Harvest Heartland each year. To recognize him for his superior community service, the Land O’Lakes Foundation has donated $500 to Second Harvest Heartland each year as part of their Dollars for Doers program.
We enjoy seeing Mike around the office every week, and appreciate all the time he’s donated to us over the years. Thank you Mike for all you do!
To learn how you can get involved with Second Harvest Heartland, click here.
Needing help with food is often unexpected, and the stories we hear every day prove it.
• Steve, a single father, had to rely on his local food shelf after suddenly losing his job, the day after his 16-year-old daughter was diagnosed with cancer.
• Mary and Bill both work, but with three young children and ailing parents to care for, they now live paycheck-to-paycheck and struggle to find enough to eat for everyone in the house.
• Rachel is struggling to find housing and enough to eat after the recent divorce from her husband. She is a chef so she can get creative with the little food they have, but she’s barely getting by.
With your help, we can turn hunger into hope for the tens of thousands of neighbors in crisis we and our partners serve every month, if even for a short time until they get back on their feet.
When you commit to making a monthly gift to Second Harvest Heartland, you deliver the help our neighbors need now, and help us plan for the months ahead so we have enough food each month to meet the growing need in our community.
For every $10 you give, we’ll provide a meal-a-day every day for a month to a neighbor in need.
Please consider becoming a Monthly Giver today, and join us in the fight against hunger. Monthly giving is easy—simply complete the form here and make changes to your contribution anytime through the online gift service center. For more information, click here.
One in 10 Minnesotans face hunger every day, and families who live in the rural and agricultural regions face a number of challenges that put them at even greater risk of missing meals. A lack of transportation, remote social service agencies and fewer jobs all make it more difficult for people to get enough food to feed themselves and their families.
That’s why we’re excited about a new partnership between farmers and local food banks that gives local growers a chance to help fight hunger in their own community. The program, called Invest an Acre, is part of a national campaign between the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, Feeding America, Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM) and Monsanto that engages U.S. farmers in helping provide food to their neighbors.
Through the program, farmers can donate the proceeds of one or more acres of crops to help feed hungry families in their own communities—with 100% of the contributions going directly to a local Feeding America food bank. And for every $1 donated, Monsanto will give $1, doubling the contribution dollar for dollar.
For information on how to donate and help feed your community, visit InvestAnAcre.org or contact your ADM elevator operator to learn more about the Invest an Acre program.
A record one in ten Minnesotans struggles to put food on the table every day. To raise funds and support for hunger relief through Second Harvest Heartland, WCCO Radio, Taste of the NFL, Land O’Lakes and General Mills will host the fourth annual “Let’s Kick Hunger Day” Radiothon on Thursday, Jan. 31, 2013 at Mall of America. The day-long radiothon, which will be broadcast on News Radio 830 WCCO, will raise funds to support Second Harvest Heartland.
Last year’s radiothon raised more than $170,000 for hunger relief. One hundred percent of your contributions will stay local and will help provide meals to children, working families and seniors in your community!
Participating in the radiothon is easy. Simply tune into WCCO Radio or stop by the Mall of America on Jan. 31 to become a Hunger Hero. Just $10 per month for a year, or a one-time gift of $120, will help provide 840 meals to those who are hungry.
To get involved, call 877.866.4376 between 5am to 6pm on Jan. 31, or click here to make a donation.
As one of our biggest supporters, Dean Foods is always helping us fight hunger in big and meaningful ways. But during the holiday season when people’s budgets are stretched tighter than normal, their donation of 1,500 gallons of fresh milk is making an even bigger impact on children, families and seniors in need.
For the third year in a row, Dean Foods is donating 1,500 gallons of milk to Second Harvest Heartland in lieu of giving holiday gifts to their top retail and foodservice customers. This genuine display of goodwill during a difficult time for so many people is heartwarming and inspiring, not only to us, but to those in our community.
And more importantly, Dean Foods knows that the need for food doesn’t subside when the holidays are over. Each year, they donate over 600,000 pounds of milk to local food shelves. In 2010, they were even awarded the Hunger Hero Award in the food donor category for making a significant impact on those who are hungry in our community.
Sincere thanks to Dean Foods—your gift will help deliver not just food, but hope, for those in need in our community.
Second Harvest Heartland is the Upper Midwest's largest hunger-relief organization, striving to end hunger through community partnerships. We form the backbone of organizations working together to efficiently alleviate hunger in 59 counties throughout Minnesota and Western Wisconsin. Read More...
Thank you to the Girl Scouts of Minnesota and Wisconsin River Valleys for their donation of more than 60,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies through their “Buy 12 Give 12” campaign. For every case of cookies purchased between February 25–March 17, Girl Scouts River Valleys donated a case to the Second Harvest Heartland food shelf network.
Join us this Saturday, May 11, for Stamp Out Hunger!
As the need for fresh, healthy food continues to grow; our new partnership with Bushel Boy Farms is both timely and exciting. 
One in six children in our community is not able to get enough food on a regular basis. That equates to thousands of hungry kids, especially during the summer when they don’t have access to school breakfast and lunch programs.
Local advertising agency, 
Food Category: The partner with outstanding value and volume of donated food.
Innovation Category: The partner with unique vision and volume delivery of a program or product.
Hunger exists everywhere in America. It doesn’t matter if you live in an urban, suburban or rural setting—hunger has no boundaries.
As the need for food assistance in our community continues to grow, your help is needed now more than ever. During the month of March, you can make a direct impact on your local food shelves and hungry neighbors through 
Minnesota’s 
Thanks to all who participated in yesterday’s Let’s Kick Hunger Day! We raised over $200,000 to kick hunger in Minnesota and western Wisconsin through generous donations and sponsor matches. And special thanks to WCCO Radio, Taste of the NFL, General Mills and Land O’Lakes for their continued partnership and support.
Mike Kothbauer, a longtime volunteer and supporter of Second Harvest Heartland, has volunteered in just about as many ways one could ever envision: He’s worked the phones at the 
One in 10 Minnesotans face hunger every day, and families who live in the rural and agricultural regions face a number of challenges that put them at even greater risk of missing meals. A lack of transportation, remote social service agencies and fewer jobs all make it more difficult for people to get enough food to feed themselves and their families.
A record one in ten Minnesotans struggles to put food on the table every day. To raise funds and support for hunger relief through Second Harvest Heartland, WCCO Radio, Taste of the NFL, Land O’Lakes and General Mills will host the fourth annual “
As one of our biggest supporters, Dean Foods is always helping us fight hunger in big and meaningful ways. But during the holiday season when people’s budgets are stretched tighter than normal, their donation of 1,500 gallons of fresh milk is making an even bigger impact on children, families and seniors in need.