It’s hard to comprehend something that’s a million of anything, isn’t it?
For instance, what would a million pounds be? What would it look like? How could you wrap your head around that?
Well, let’s try this: Picture an average conventional school bus. Yellow and black, and full of students. It would weigh about 20,000 pounds.
So how many school buses would it take to equal a million pounds? 50 buses. … Which, I think we can agree, is a lot of buses.
Now imagine all of those buses driving onto a massive scale all at once. … And that is the amount of food that was distributed by the Dorothy Day Food Pantry, just one more service that Churches United provides to the Fargo-Moorhead and surrounding community.
Actually, we distributed more than a million pounds of food to our neighbors last year, but what’s a few thousand extra pounds here or there among friends?
Putting that into even more perspective, our pantry distributes 32 percent of all the food distributed by pantries or similar services in all of Clay County. No matter how you slice it, that is a big chunk of people served by our pantry.
Each new day that I spend with our organization, I discover again and again what is so special about our 37-year-old Churches United, which was founded in 1987 by 11 local faith groups originating in a no-longer-used church.
It’s not only that we provide safe shelter for about 120 people every night, it’s the fact that we also provide emergency food support to 5,500 area households per month at our food pantry, feed 6,000 meals to our neighbors each month at our Community Center and house even more folks at our 43-unit permanent supportive housing complex known as Bright Sky Apartments.
When we say that we provide “safe shelter, stable housing, nutritious food and a path toward healing -- which is our mission -- we seriously mean it. We’re here for our neighbor in a spectrum of ways, and we are so very grateful for all of our neighbors who are helping us to continue to focus on this critical work.
And the headline needs to be that the needs in our community just continue to grow.
In 2023, the number of people experiencing homelessness in the Fargo-Moorhead area increased by nearly 70 percent compared to 2022. Numbers last year showed more than 1,000 people were homeless in the F-M metro on any given night, according to our FM Coalition to End Homelessness, with 200 of those being children.
Is hunger also on the rise in our community too? Yep, most certainly.
A total of 156,479 individuals turned to the Great Plains Food Bank and its network of feeding programs for food assistance in 2023, of which Churches United participates in. Even more alarming is that was the highest single-year total in the organization’s 40-year history. … Even more than the pandemic years!
Imagine 50 school buses’ worth of food going out our doors each year. And now imagine the 5,500 households in our community who benefited from this vital resource.
Friends, thanks to your support, Churches United can continue to do the work of the gospel, meaning we actually can clothe the naked, feed the hungry, house the unsheltered and help heal those who hurt.
If you’ve given to support Churches United, we are deeply grateful for your support. If you haven’t yet given, but have the means to do so, we’d also be grateful for you to join our mission to serve our neighbors. Thank you!
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