Poor people are too lazy to work.
Jobs that pay a living wage keep disappearing so poverty and hunger keeps increasing.
A living wage in this region of Ohio means earning over $15 an hour for a family
of three. Low and middle income workers are worse off today than they were just
12 months ago. Fact is, jobs that pay a living wage are hard to come by and with
the rising cost of fuel and food more and more families who used to be able to make
ends meet now turn to us for help.
It's their own fault they're poor.
It is expensive to be poor. Your housing is usually not energy efficient,
so your utility bills are higher. Your car is a money trap, but you can't afford
anything better. More than likely, if you are working, you are working two part-time
jobs with no benefits while trying to juggle inadequate pay to meet your family's
needs. Fact is, the majority of those served by our network are children, senior
citizens and disabled adults.
As the economy worsens, people who used to support food drives and donate funds
to hunger relief now find themselves standing in the ever increasing lines at our
network of food pantries.
Women just keep having babies to get more welfare.
With the advent of welfare reform in the mid nineties, poor people can only receive
welfare benefits for a total 36 months during their entire lifetime. Fact is, 79
percent of the families seeking emergency food from our network of charities are
female-headed households with two children and only 2 percent of them receive welfare.
People abuse the system, they aren't starving.
People are not starving in this country – not like you see in third world countries
– but they do suffer from “food insecurity” which means people on the low end of
the economic scale skip ten or more meals each month. Fact is, the average monthly
income for a family of four who receive food through our network is $822. Try to
make ends meet each month with that amount of money.
Children don’t go hungry here.
One in five children in Ohio face the threat of hunger everyday. Regardless of how
you may feel about why poor people are poor, children living in this country should
not be going hungry. Not now, not ever.
Mission
Our mission is to find, rescue and distribute food to people living in poverty through an efficient network uniting the public and private sectors, and to raise awareness of the impact of poverty. Read more...