Teen venture philanthropy: who would have thought something like that existed?  Temple Emanuel’s Money and Teens Creating Hope (MATCH) program is proving cynics wrong by educating and encouraging teenage congregants to participate in charitable giving.  This year, in solidarity up with Fed Up With Hunger, MATCH decided to support the fight against hunger in Los Angeles.

MATCH invited some of us on the Fed Up With Hunger team to  talk with teens about the issue and help guide their giving.  We wanted to do more than just talk, so we devised a hands-on, interactive workshop called “Who’s Hungry in LA?”  The workshop confronts participants with six different situations in which an individual or family cannot afford their weekly groceries.  The challenge is to figure out how to leverage a limited income and available support services  to get enough to eat. 

The workshop showed the teens how difficult it to secure a week’s worth of food on a shoestring budget.   I knew we had hit home when several of them stuck around after the workshop to find out about how they could become personally involved with Fed Up With Hunger.   Perhaps they were “fed up” themselves after seeing how maddeningly difficult it can be just to get enough nutritious food for a week.  As Sartre was wont to say, “Everything has been figured out, except how to live.”  Good thing is, hunger is just the sort of existential plight that we can do something about.

If you’re interested in using our “Who’s Hungry in LA?” workshop materials for a class, event, or meeting, please contact us at FedUpWithHunger@JewishLA.org.