The bleakest job market since the Great Depression has driven a new breed of client en masse to the Food Banks in 2009: managerial-level employees dealing with long-term unemployment; contractors and commission-based workers; and families who were getting by before one parent lost a job. The middle class, which only occasionally used the services of our 275 community agencies before the economy turned, has been converted with staggering speed into the low-income.

The 2009 holiday season, now upon us, will be the highest-demand period in our 24-year history. If you can’t feed 100 people, help us feed one.

Proceeds from Live from the Archives 16 are expected to push total contributions from KFOG to Bay Area Food Banks past the $4 million mark! Get your copy of this world-class compilation – featuring artists like Mat Kearney, David Gray, The Pretenders, The Fray, Susan Tedeschi, Little Feat and many more – at Bay Area Peet’s Coffee & Tea locations starting Saturday, Nov. 7. Prefer to shop online for the white-hot CD that sells out year after year?

Preview the tracks and buy your copy here.

Merchants and individuals throughout Alameda County have taking a stand against hunger – and helping the Food Bank in the highest-demand period in its history – by launching innovative events and promotions. Help them help us.

“When (Alameda County’s) food bank moved into a new warehouse in 2005, it installed a huge cooler, as big as a suburban house. Suzan Bateson, the food bank’s executive director, recently took me on a tour. “We built this with the vision that it would be our future,” she said, as we stood shivering inside.

That year her food bank became one of the first in the country to ban donations of carbonated beverages, which meant an immediate hit of roughly a million pounds to the food bank’s most important statistic: pounds distributed. “I made a promise to the board that I’d replace it with fresh produce,” she said.

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This has been an exceptional year of economic hardship in Alameda County. Our Emergency Food Helpline requests in the third quarter of 2009 increased 53% from the same period in 2008 … and have escalated 95% compared to the third quarter of 2007. Help us get a jump on what will be the highest-demand holiday season in the Food Bank’s history by starting your own Food & Fund Drive in October. The food and cash we collect will be turned around in time to put Thanksgiving food on the table for the legions of Alameda County residents who have never before needed our services – as well as those whom we’ve helped before.

Recipients of the Food Bank’s 2009 “Hope Not Hunger Award” waged heroic campaigns against hunger:
LEFT: San Lorenzo postal carrier Dennis Stecz and Pleasanton postmaster Gurjant Khosa (U.S. Postal Service) were trailblazers in the 2009 Letter Carriers Drive, which netted 909,812 pounds of food in the Bay Area – a 40% increase of the previous year – and a record 172,671 pounds in Alameda County.
RIGHT: No county has benefitted from the food bank allotment of the Chronicle’s Season of Sharing Fund more than Alameda, which has reaped $1.9 million since 1990, including donations topping $150,000 in each of the past two years. Jennifer Kirschenbaum is the Fund’s executive editor.
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Read about Hunger Heroes whose outstanding deeds have helped the Food Bank serve 40,000 people each week.