Omaha’s 26th annual Holiday Lights Festival is set to begin this Saturday. With that comes the return of the “Shine the Light on Hunger” campaign, which began 19 years ago when then-Omaha Mayor Hal Daub decided to include it in the Holiday Lights Festival.
Rahul Sualy, vice president of information technology at Conagra Brands, said the goal this year is to provide the food equivalent of 6 million meals for the Food Bank of the Heartland to distribute across 77 counties in Nebraska and 16 in western Iowa.
Along with this goal, he announced Conagra will match monetary donations up to $100,000, and that Farm Credit Services of America, WoodmenLife and Baker’s have pledged to extend the match to a total of $200,000. Sualy mentioned a few different ways people can help accomplish this goal.
“Donating nonperishable food in the orange food bins around town in Omaha’s local arts and cultural organizations and Baker supermarkets,” Sualy said. “Making a monetary donation to the Food Bank for the Heartland directly through the online deduction page at Holiday Lights Festival.org. Donating when you park using the Omaha mobile payment app or when you pay at a multi space kiosk, and of course, taking the time to volunteer at the Food bank [for the Heartland] to help sort and pack donated food collected through this community wide effort.”
Brian Barks, president and CEO of Food Bank for the Heartland, said there are about 260,000 people in the food bank’s coverage area who are considered food insecure and do not have the resources to put a healthy meal on the table. Barks said the organization has seen the number of food-insecure people rise within the last five years.
“Through the first three months of our [current] fiscal year — July, August and September — the amount of need that we saw was up 6.5%. The number, the amount of resources we had available, food, was down 11%,” Barks said.
He said it is an opportunity for people to rally around and support those who may not have enough food to eat or must make tough decisions such as not paying rent, to afford food.
“Sometimes people will make other decisions [such as], ‘I’m going to feed my child, but I’m not going to eat tonight,’” said Barks. “‘I’m going to skip lunch and dinner tonight.’ Those are some decisions that about 260,000 people in our service area are making every single day, and then when it’s exacerbated by the government shutting down, it makes those decisions even more difficult.”
He said it’s too early to see the effects from the federal government shutdown yet, when more than 155,000 Nebraskans temporarily lost their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Benefits, because people had to make decisions where they sacrificed paying for something else, like rent, medication or loans, in lieu of being able to feed themselves and or their family.
Barks said what this campaign does best is to put food insecurity front and center.
“Many parts of our business that we do at the food bank [are] seasonal. Financial giving — very seasonal in November. And December — people donating food — again, very seasonal. Volunteering, very seasonal. However, the amount of food that we distribute out of our facility is not that seasonal. It’s pretty steady throughout the entire year. We distribute roughly about the same amount of food, whether it’s January and February, or whether it’s November and December.”
Bark said this campaign helps during the holiday season but also throughout the rest of the year. There are 21 physical drop-off locations, which can be found at the Holiday Lights Festival website, along with the page to make monetary donations.
The festival starts with the official lighting ceremony at Omaha’s Gene Leahy Mall on Saturday at 5 p.m. and lasts until Dec. 31 with a New Year’s Eve fireworks show.