Fighting Hunger and Building Job Skills: Another WIN/WIN

Identity has entered into two new collaborations to fight hunger while empowering community members with new outreach skills and meaningful work experience.

With Manna Food Center, ten Identity parents  are training as “promotoras” (community outreach workers).  They will be making calls to people in their networks who might be struggling in silence –such as co-workers and fellow congregants in areas hard hit by COVID-19 including Gaithersburg, Germantown, Wheaton and Silver Spring—and helping them access Manna’s food assistance. Manna and Identity have a long history of working together to prevent hunger in Montgomery County, and this project will not only reach into some of our most isolated neighborhoods, but will also open up new paid work experiences for the parent promotoras.

With the Montgomery County Food Council and Burness, we are collaborating to improve food access to federal benefits like SNAP. Burness and the MCFC are training two of our Youth Opportunity Center program participants to reach out to eligible families and help them with the often complicated or intimidating process of accessing federal food benefits.  They will conduct their outreach and technical assistance in both English and Spanish, and help translate food assistance referral tools and create social media posts to increase awareness of food available to those who need it. They will receive a modest gift card as well as a meaningful work experience. The Montgomery County Food Council, Identity and Burness Communications share a commitment to the creation of a vibrant food system that is accessible to all residents.