Re: What did you donate this week? Mom with 4 kids lost her husband a year or so ago and recently had some surgery herself that left her out of work for a bit - but since she 'has a job' she can't get assistance so she has been unable to really feed her family. I have been aware of this situation for a while but was told she is very proud and I was afraid I'd offend her if I offered to help. Well, she must have finally hit the bottom because she asked a mutual friend for a grocery loan. Mutual friend called me (I have talked to mutual friend about this situation so she knew I wanted to help).
I donated about 3 to 4 weeks of pantry, meat and poultry, dairy, breakfast, snacks, veggies, etc (depends how thrifty a cook she is) to this family of 5. This was done from my stock pile and did not really put much of a dent in it. Another giving soul friend of ours went to Costco and got her lots of stuff - so she should be good for a while.
She cried when she saw the food, first words out of her mouth were OMG my kids are gonna be so happy.:frown: There was no pride involved, this was about feeding her kids. Tears me up just thinking about it. I made sure though that she understood that this is not taking from my food budget, that my food budget is 1/4 of what it used to be and that what I was able to help them with was free and planned for donation.
Stuff like that makes it so worth the time I put in to doing this. I offered to teach her how to coupon and stock and she said she wants to learn. I hope she does.
So, what I want to do is keep helping her and her kids while teaching her to use a portion of her food budget for perishables and a portion for stockpiling and using the rest for other bills or something else.
Advice? I have done this for my family but we had the extra needed to start stocking right away. I have turned some others on to it as well. I have never done this with someone that literally could not feed her family. I don't know where to help her start. |