'tis the season to be jollily (yes) giving!

Let's talk turkey. (it's that time of year, eh?) If you know me already, you know that The "Hub" has been an integral part of my life for the last 2 and change years. And if you don't know me in the flesh and/or do know me and didn't know that tidbit - now you do.

This week will mark the 120-ishth week of one seriously buff, grass-roots and merrily motley crew of volunteers delivering groceries, essentials and a butt-ton of diapers (get it?) to our now 100+ family list in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, PA - one whose residents continue to feel the aftermath of the pandemic and simultaneously face one of the worst opioid crises in the country. Every day.

Our founder, Annabel Wulfhart , began this journey in the summer of 2020 during the height of civil unrest in our cities, as many families who were already struggling to make ends meet in their own ways encountered a whole new set of 'end of level' bosses to defeat in attempts to do so, courtesy of an already severely broken and imbalanced system that was never designed to ensure their prosperity to begin with.

Cut to November 2022 and sub 'many' for 'a multitude' of families and a waitlist a mile long. "Why a waitlist?" you ask. As reality would bark at us daily, we can only furnish the number of bags we can afford to fill; affording, in our terms, reads as time and resources. As an organization comprised of people that are full time employees elsewhere, parents and a slew of other things to their communities, we afford the group our time. Check. One down. We're also fortunate enough to have been recently featured in a few publications, awareness is growing and we've got volunteers coming out of our ears - another check.

Enter the third check. (This is where you come in). Resources. Connections. Donations. And ultimately, dollars. All of them. Keeping the piggy bank plump is an endeavor all of its own, but the task is bigger than brining home the proverbial bacon. We'll take actual bacon. A connection to bacon? Super. A plug to recurring delivery of bacon? Even better. And while we don't actually deliver bacon, you get the point. Know someone in the foodshare/distro biz? Make me an intro. Whatever you've got, we'll take - and we desperately need your help.

This magical, uniform resource locator https://www.papermillfoodhub.com/ will guide you to our website, where we'd be eternally grateful for your support this holiday season and beyond. I've got a few thousand sum odd followers on this platform. If I moved everyone of them enough to depress their mouse button over that purple link and toss out even a dollar, we'd raise enough money to fuel the Hub for an entire month.

Us humans have a lot of supplyin' to do out there in our nook of the world, and as I always say, the demand doesn't sleep. I read a quote the other day that reference how we struggle so internally with all of the injustices in the world today, the silver lining being that they're all related. So whatever we're doing to pull our thread in whatever corner of the world we're in...we're helping to unravel the whole damn thing. Join us in the yarn-pulling. And knit yourself a little justice sweater out of the remnants. We promise the coze is incomparable.