I’m a big fan of the Alameda County Community Food Bank (ACCFB) and their mission to get everyone in the county fed. There’s a lot of great local nonprofits out there which I advocate for and want to support, but the food bank has concrete goals that are unquestionably good. They feed so many people who would otherwise suffer needlessly. As a community acupuncturist and general advocate for community health, making sure that our people are nourished meets one of the most basic and fundamental aspects of health and wellbeing.
We’ve done a lot of food drives to benefit them over the last twelve years. After we do our food drives, the ACCFB would sometimes send us a certificate stating how many pounds of food we’ve collected. We haven’t always been good about saving these certificates, but, adding up the ones we do have on file, we’ve collected, with your help, 3,396 pounds of food. Which is a ton of food! (Actually it’s about 1.7 tons.).
But, here’s the thing. While I know that the bits and pieces of canned food carefully piled in barrels is helpful for the food bank, it’s not nearly as helpful as actual money. They say that for every dollar donated, they are able to leverage that into $7 worth of food. This is why the virtual food drive is so great. I have a good friend who told me that his mission every day is to figure out how to be of service, to make the world better, even if it’s in some small, seemingly insignificant way. I try to follow his example and helping the food bank is one of my ways of being of service for doing something good in this weird, wild world. There’s so much suffering and discord on the planet right now, it’s paralyzing and overwhelming. But today, if you are able, you can do one act of goodness in the form of a small donation to the ACCFB.
Because acupuncture doesn’t work well on an empty stomach.