Colorful streamers floated down at the meal reveal of Arvest’s 15th annual Million Meals at Arkansas Foodbank in Little Rock Thursday morning.
Cereal boxes were revealed to display the number 302,472 that represented the meals raised for central Arkansas to help stock food pantries during the busy summer months. This equated to $60,508.28 donated to the Arkansas Foodbank from the Arvest campaign.
The total raised for the four-state Arvest region of Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri and Kansas was 3,080,502 meals.
“The four states where Arvest has a presence…those states rank really, really high in a bad way in food insecurity, meaning people don’t know where their next meal is going to come from,” said Ron Witherspoon, bank president and CEO for the Arvest bank in Little Rock.
“It being the 15th year, we wanted to have a 15% increase over what we raised last year. We were able to achieve it,” Witherspoon said.
“We have this incredible facility the community has given to us that make sure we can leverage 100% of donations like this directly towards a food purchase and the distribution system is required,” said Arkansas Foodbank CEO Brian Burton. “It means the world. We would feed far fewer people without this.”
Arkansas ranks first in the nation for food insecurity; with a 18.9% of household prevalence in 2021-2023. The second was Texas at 17%, and the national average being 12.2%, according to USDA.
Arkansas ranks second for ‘very low food security’ at 6.7% with South Carolina in first at 7%. The U.S. average was 4.7%, according to USDA.
发表回复