IFT Continues to Show It Cares
The 2012 IFT Annual Meeting & Food Expo will wrap up in a meaningful way for dozens of attendees who will volunteer on Friday, June 29, as part of the annual IFT Cares anti-hunger initiative. Volunteers will spend Friday morning working at the Three Square Food Bank in Las Vegas, sorting products and repacking them to be distributed to member agencies and the clients they serve.
IFT Cares participants will leave the LVH-Las Vegas Hilton Hotel & Casino at 7:30 a.m. Friday and return at noon. Staff members from the food bank will join the volunteers on the bus trip to the facility, narrating a tour through a food-drought neighborhood of the city and explaining the impact the food bank has had there.
A few volunteer spots are still available. So if you’d like to devote a few hours pitching in to benefit residents of IFT’s host city on Friday, stop by the Annual Meeting & Food Expo registration area in Hall N1 of the convention center to sign up in advance.
The Three Square Food Bank, a member of the Feeding America network of food banks, supplies more than 24 million pounds of food and grocery products—the equivalent of nearly 18 million meals annually—to more than 650 program partners throughout Southern Nevada.
Three Square provides food and nutrition programming to nearly 100,000 people each month, but calculates that it is reaching only about a third of those who need help. By one estimate, 295,000 people in Clark County, where Las Vegas is located, are food insecure.
A few additional statistics provided on the Three Square Food Bank website are indicative of the scope of food insecurity in the area:
• One in six households in Nevada is dealing with hunger.
• About half of the children in the Clark County School District qualify to receive free and reduced-price meals.
• The food bank’s agency partners serve nearly 40,000 children under the age of 18 each month.
This year marks the fifth anniversary for the IFT Cares philanthropic initiative, which got its start at the 2008 Annual Meeting & Food Expo in New Orleans, when IFT partnered with the Second Harvest Food Bank of Greater New Orleans and Acadiana. For five years, IFT volunteers have made a difference in the Annual Meeting & Food Expo’s host city.
