Community FoodBank of NJ: The Two Words a South Jersey Kid Shouldn’t Have to Say

Organization: Community FoodBank of New Jersey (Egg Harbor Township branch)

Location: Egg Harbor Township, NJ (Atlantic County)

Founded: 1975 (statewide); Southern branch serving Atlantic, Cape May and Cumberland counties

EGG HARBOR TOWNSHIP — There is a name on this program that stops me every time I read it: “Let Us Eat — Please.” Say it out loud and you hear a child in it. The please is the part that gets me. Because behind every number in every hunger statistic out of South Jersey is a kid who learned to ask politely for something no kid should have to ask for at all.

September is Hunger Action Month, and it tends to arrive with big round numbers — this week the PSEG Foundation announced $500,000 in grants split among eighty New Jersey and Long Island nonprofits fighting food insecurity, part of more than a million dollars the foundation will hand out this year. Those grants matter. But numbers aren’t where hunger lives. Hunger lives at a kitchen table on a Thursday when the groceries have to stretch to Monday, and everybody at that table knows it.

Bags of food, on a schedule

That’s the table the Community FoodBank of New Jersey’s Egg Harbor Township branch has been setting for years. In a corner of the state where child hunger runs especially high, the branch runs a longstanding summer partnership called “Let Us Eat — Please,” working with the Atlantic County law firm Cooper Levenson to deliver biweekly groceries to families through participating school districts. It’s a quiet arrangement — no ribbon-cuttings, no photo ops — bags of food moving from a warehouse to a school to a family who needed them, on a schedule, without fuss.

I think about what that steadiness means to a parent. Food insecurity isn’t only about a single empty cupboard; it’s about not knowing. It’s the arithmetic that runs behind a mother’s eyes while she smiles and tells her kids dinner’s coming. A program that shows up every two weeks, reliably, does something a one-time donation can’t: it takes a little of the not knowing off her shoulders. It lets a kid be a kid instead of a small accountant.

It lets a kid be a kid instead of a small accountant.Emma Brooks

The need doesn’t clock out

The Southern branch serves three South Jersey counties — Atlantic, Cape May and Cumberland — where the distance to the nearest full-service grocery store can be its own kind of hunger. When the summer ends and the school-year rhythm returns, the need doesn’t clock out. It moves indoors, into the months when heating bills compete with grocery bills and a nor’easter like the one that just battered this region can knock a fragile household budget flat.

What I keep landing on is how ordinary the heroes of this story are. Not celebrities. Warehouse volunteers who load bags. School staff who make sure the right kid gets the right delivery without a single classmate noticing. Lawyers at a firm who decided their letterhead could mean groceries. None of them will ever meet most of the families they feed. They do it anyway. That’s the whole thing about South Jersey, the part I never get tired of writing: people here take care of the neighbors they’ll never be thanked by.

The please in that program name is a child’s word. Our job — as neighbors, as a region, as people lucky enough to have set a full table this week — is to make sure the answer is always, immediately, yes.

HOW TO HELP: The Community FoodBank of New Jersey’s Southern branch in Egg Harbor Township accepts food donations, financial gifts and volunteers year-round; visit cfbnj.org to give, sign up for a shift, or find food assistance near you. During Hunger Action Month, the FoodBank notes that a single dollar can help provide multiple meals for a South Jersey family.

Based on reporting from ROI-NJ, PR Newswire, the PSEG Foundation and the Community FoodBank of New Jersey. This is a community feature draft —