INFORMATION
Bread Break is a food-harvesting mission that works with restaurants and cafeterias to collect perfectly good, unused prepared food, freeze it, and distribute it to ministry centers which feed those in need.
The Food Pantry allows clients to obtain food once every 3 months while the Food To You mobile food pantry allows families to get food once a month. Clearly more needs to be done to feed hungry and struggling families.
Little has been done to consistently harvest food from restaurants and other food providers. Estimates are that 8 million pounds of food is currently thrown away each year in a city the size of Sioux Falls.
Bread Break is one part of Messiah New Hope’s efforts to provide support for the homeless and struggling families within our community. We also host the Mobile Food Pantry the second Thursday of each month where we provide a meal to the 80 to 120 families that arrive. We host a supper every Wednesday for the local neighborhood and also have a fully stocked food pantry.
We had our first pickup of donated food on Nov. 21, 2011. Through 2017 we have harvested over 780,000 pounds of food and produce with a value of 1.4 million dollars.
Our Grand Total for 2012 was 30,082 pounds! Roughly 1500 pounds will feed a person for a year, so our total provided enough to feed 20 people. In 2013 we harvested 50,833 pounds, 131,000 pounds in 2014, 148,000 pounds in 2015, 201,000 pounds in 2016 and 217,000 pounds in 2017.
We now have 40 providers with 16-20,000 pounds of food per month delivered to 28 non-profit agencies. We provide over 6,000 pounds per month to St. Francis House and over 2,000 pounds per month to the VOA Veterans Assistance Center. The national VOA provides matching funds for the value of the food we provide which helps cover one-third of the budget for the Veterans Assistance Center. St. Francis House received over $152,000 in matching funds from the food we provided in 2017.
On May 11, 2017 we received the Spirit of Volunteerism Group Award sponsored by The Helpline Center.
In December of 2017 we received a grant of $606 from the Sioux Empire Fund For Hunger Relief of the Sioux Falls Area Community Foundation. We also received a grant of $8,000 from the Jerstad Family Foundation. In February of 2018 we received a grant of $2,000 from the ELCA World Hunger Domestic Hunger Grant program.
