Most people also realize what your project demonstrates…we have the capacity to feed all the hungry mouths in our communities. The cause of food insecurity in our communities is access to food resrources, not a lack of food.

Over twenty-five years ago a small study group got together in our church to study world hunger. We read Francis Moore-Lappe’s “Diet for a Small Planet”
Out of this study group grew the garden project.
Since we live in a rural area we capitalized on our abundant natural resources… lot’s of arable land and knowledge about how to grow food. The garden project has been providing seeds and plants to families to grow their own food for over 20 yrs and for the past 3 years we have re-organized our community gardening program. This year saw two school gardens started to demonstrate sustainable and organic growing methods among elementary age students. The school gardens are both organized by local college students from Kenyon College and the Mount Vernon Nazaren University.

Urban community gardens are on the rise and a great way of involving the community in the process of building/growing access to local, organic and fresh produce.

I love the concept of sharing out of the abundance of our gardens. Community gardens/school gardens extend this sharing to the abundance of knowledge about how to grow your own…whether it’s in a container, a roof top garden or community plot where new gardeners can learn from more seasoned growers. HAPPY GROWING >!<

I am the founder of the AmpleHarvest.org campaign.

You raise some very good points, and I’d like to give you my thoughts.

In a rural/farm area, having poor neighbors pick some of your crops is quite easily done. In a suburban area, having needy strangers come into your backyard to do this same is just not doable in many cases – insurance, privacy, property damage etc all make it a less than desirable approach.

More to your point however is that in urban/suburban areas, most people can’t farm for a living… so teaching someone to grow crops wont help much.

HOWEVER….. providing a child with healthy, fresh grown food can leave him/her more focused on doing well in school than listening to a grumbling stomach all day. It is this child that will, with better grades, have a job/career that will help break the cycle of poverty that may have overwhelmed his/her family in the past. This *does* meet the criterion of making the recipient self sufficient… just not quite the way the Rambam had anticipated.

AmpleHarvest.org is not about feeling good (although nearly everyone does) … it is about doing good… helping hungry neighbors while also diminishing global warming (i.e. repairing the world).

I do hope that you will help encourage as many food pantries as possible to visit and then subscribe to AmpleHarvest.org

Are you? Is this really tzedaka or merely charity? Are you empowering the subject population or keeping them in a state of dependency on handouts?Part of the concept of gleaning was to leave the corner of the field unharvested – this metaphorically empowered the have nots so that they felt it was “their land” – unfortunately that concept has gone the way of the dodo. Getting B’nai tzedek kids to harvest in the name of “tikun olam” is a long way from what the original intent of the mitzva was.

While we always gave surplus harvest (and fresh eggs) to our local VT food pantry (run by the local church), we also arranged for gleaning days where those who needed the food had a chance to help themselves both literally and figuratively. The Rambam said that the highest form of tzedaka is to make the recipient self-sufficient thus ending the cycle of poverty. Ask yourself honestly if these feel-good gleanings (complete with t-shirts and bottled water) solve or exacerbate the problem. Food for thought:)