Menu For Hope 2007: World Food Programme
It's that time of year again when food bloggers around the world join together for Menu for Hope. The campaign involves food bloggers (and others) from around the world each donating something to be raffled off on-line for charity, or (as in my case) supporting the campaign by buying tickets.
The raffle is open to anybody, not just bloggers, and is run through online charity fundraising company, Firstgiving. Tickets are $10 each.
To donate (and maybe win a prize!), just visit check out the list of offered prizes, visit the participating sites to read all about the raffle items and then place a bid by going to the regional host's site. At the end of the campaign, winners are chosen using a software application, after which the hosts will tell people the good news of what they have won.
The UK prizes alone range from culinary tours of London, food baskets and kits, cookbooks, cookware, your own personal chef, restaurant meals, and a whole lot of other exciting foodie prizes. So go check out the wonderful things offered, buy a raffle ticket or two (or three or more, as it's hard to choose only a couple) and know you're helping support a worthy cause, the World Food Programme.
"Last year Menu for Hope raised just over $60,000!
And as with last year, the money will be going to the World Food Programme (WFP) and this year's campaign is going to be particularly exciting. This is because the WFP has allowed Menu for Hope (MfH) to earmark the funds to a specific program. The organisers of MfH have chosen a school feeding program in the mountain kingdom of Lesotho.
Currently, the WFP's school feeding programme provides a daily nutritious meal to nearly 150,000 school kids in Lesotho, many of them orphans. After five years of drought, it is estimated that disease and malnutrition in Lesotho claim the lives of one in 12 children before they reach the age of five. Chronic and persistent vulnerability prevails in Lesotho. The kingdom is confronting the triple threat of increasing chronic poverty, rising HIV/AIDS rates and weakened government capacity. This threat takes a heavy toll on the households of the rural poor in Lesotho, who are faced with a limited number of coping strategies to respond to the intensifying hazard. 56% of the population live on less then $2 per day. Think about that. That's less than a pound.
During the campaign, MfH are going to have the kids photo-blogging from the school grounds to bring their stories closer to us and our donors. Also, the WFP have been pushing what they call the Local Procureent program: instead of buying surplus food in the US and shipping it to Africa to feed the kids they are now buying maize and other produce from the local farmers, thereby putting funds back into the local economy."
