Cereal, peanut butter, pasta, sauce and other essential household staples are inside the brown cardboard emergency food boxes.
But it’s innovative “outside-the-box” thinking and “extremely generous” acts of charity that are powering and placing the ingredients inside.
“The innovation that is happening—we are leveraging all opportunities, and it takes a lot of infrastructure to meet an immense challenge,” said Joe Arthur, executive director of the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank. “But we want folks to feel confident that, if they need help, the food is going to be there for them.”
The “immense challenge” Arthur’s talking about is the sudden, unprecedented spike in families who need help putting food on their tables amid the COVID-19 pandemic’s simultaneous economic crisis.
Karen Hendricks 