The Verde Valley, population 60,000, once northern Arizona’s breadbasket of agriculture is struggling with rural hunger. One in four adults, or approximately 15,000 people don’t know where their next meal will come from. Even worse, one in three children are hungry and malnourished. That’s 20,000 hungry children.
These numbers are increasing as close to half of the middle class residents are sliding into poverty, due to job loss, low wages, home foreclosures, and bankruptcies.
The working poor, often juggling several low paying jobs, find they need to turn to emergency food resources because they can’t make it.
The people living in the Verde Valley are proud, independent, and hard working, when they can get work. They are unwilling, for the most part, to reveal their inability to put food on the table.
Hunger here is a Silent Disease.
Go to YavapaiFoodCouncil.org to learn more or donate.