Kalamazoo Loaves and Fishes: The Website

Kalamazoo Loaves and Fishes has a really well set up website which lays out things that you would want to know about them and more. My favorite part of their website is the bottom right side of their home page, which has a section titled "Hunger Stories." This consists of testimonies about KLF from actual people who use their services. Sometimes you need to see more than just numbers to know that something is working (at least in my opinion).
Much of the food that KLF distributes to the hungry in Kalamazoo's community is donated from either the rest of the community or larger food drives.
This whole service was created in 1982 by a group of churches. They were concerned about getting more food out to the hungry in their community, so they combined their resources.
If you need proof of how effective they are, they do provide you with some numbers.
In 2012, they reported getting food to about 127,000 people. That totaled up to about 1.6 million pounds of food distributed out to the Kalamazoo community.
On top of this, KLF also provides "prepared meal support, senior commodity programs, agency food support, food packs for kids, and other community food programs." They do not make feeding people a competition with the other food programs in the area. Instead, they help these other programs by sending them food.
One of their programs is called "Weekend Food Program." This consists of sending participating schoolchildren home each weekend with a food pack. I really liked this program in particular because if you think about it, schools have programs (at least mine did) where they have cheaper lunches for kids who sign up for it because of financial troubles, but as soon as they get home they are stuck with whatever their parents manage to get. With the "Weekend Food Program", though, they do not have to worry about searching for food on the weekends.