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Poverty In Food Bank Essay

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Before I came here for high school, I always thought the U.S. as a country without poverty; it has affluence resources, superior technologies, and an efficient politic system. After all, the U.S. is the most developed country in the world, and it is hard to associate poverty with Americans.

However, my experiences of volunteering in food banks changed my perception about poverty problem in the U.S.: it is more prevalent than I thought. I volunteered for two different food banks. While I admire American Community Churches and other organizations for their devotion to their acts of charity, I also noticed some neglected facts.

For example, there exists a common perception about food bank playing a vital role in resolving poverty, but the public selectively neglects the fact that food …show more content…

When I was volunteering in the food bank, there were very few new faces, and the most of them were our “regular customers.”

They would show up seven days a week, come by car and fetch the whole family’s ration, or all the family members would come to take their ration. It hard to imagine that an entire family has to live such miserable life in such a long period of time.

While I am grateful to those benefactors and Samaritans for assuring the food banks had adequate food storage and donations, I realized that this is not a permanent solution for poverty, as evidenced by the same group of people repeatedly showing up every week.

As a charity, food banks are not meant to eradicate poverty; instead, they should be considered as a complimentary social service aid the most, which most people neglect to remember. The only solutions to improve conditions for the poor are increasing productivity and increasing allocation efficiency: either to make the pie larger or to divide the pie more

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