Members of the Middletown community took part in the “Feed the Little Children” food drive at the Amazing Grace food pantry this week to combat child hunger in the city. The drive drew most of its donations from city employees and students from Middletown’s eight elementary schools.
The event was sponsored by the Middletown School Readiness Program, St. Vincent de Paul Place, and a wide array of other local charities and organizations.
The drive was part of the fourth annual “National Week of the Young Child,” which draws attention to childhood hunger and malnutrition. Area schoolchildren were encouraged by their teachers to donate food to the effort, according to Middletown Mayor Dominique Thornton.
Thornton donated several bags of food to Amazing Grace herself.
“[The food drive] was a great success,” Thornton said. “[The scale of the donations] was so large that city public works had to pick up all the boxes of food and deliver them to the pantry.”
According to Thornton the drive had an incredibly positive effect for the children who participated.
“If you can raise the awareness of a child, a lot of times the ideas will stay with them and result in a lifetime of social consciousness and awareness,” Thorton said.
Significantly, the food drive shed light on the fact that there is a hunger problem in Middletown that needs to be addressed.
“We have about forty percent of our school children citywide who receive free or reduced lunch,” said Thornton. “So we are aware that there is a problem.”
According to Thornton there are approximately 500 homeless people in Middletown. Of those, she said, roughly 100 have children.
These numbers coincide with an estimate by the Middlesex Coalition for Children that there are 1,000 to 1,200 area children who are at risk of hunger.
Thornton stressed the need for continued efforts in fighting hunger in the Middletown area. She cited several organizations that her office was working with to distribute food to those in need. One organization, of which Thorton is co-chair, is the Middlesex Coalition for Children, whose mission it is to eradicate hunger among local residents.
“We put this together last April because last year was the fourth year of the recession and there was a jobless recovery. Neighboring mayors were reporting a fifteen to twenty percent increase in the need for emergency food,” Thorton said.
Thornton encouraged students at Wesleyan to get involved in community efforts to reduce hunger. She highlighted research being done by Wesleyan Sociology Professor Rob Rosenthal’s class, which is studying Middletown’s hunger problem. Thornton stressed the need to mobilize the community to provide food for the pantry.
Despite the significant activism on the Wesleyan campus, there has been relatively little attention given to issues of hunger and malnutrition in the Middletown community. Although there are Amazing Grace bins for canned food donations at Weshop and Exley Science Center, most students are unaware of such efforts.
“I’ve seen boxes for clothes but I haven’t seen anything for food,” said Kimberly Strovink ’08. “It’s surprising on such an activist campus, to see little attention paid to hunger in the community.”
For more information about contributing food or volunteering, contact Kathleen Kelly at Amazing Grace at 860-347-3222 or Peter Harding at St. Vincent de Paul Place at 860-343-0023.
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