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Food for Thought helps fight hunger in South Hills

By Harry Funk 4 min read
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Stacey Reibach and Sheryl Cohen help get ready for the Feb. 28 Empty Bowls South Hills event.

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A bowl is decorated at Color Me Mine in South Hills Village.

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A bowl is decorated at Color Me Mine in South Hills Village.

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A bowl is decorated at Color Me Mine in South Hills Village.

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A bowl is decorated at Color Me Mine in South Hills Village.

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A bowl is decorated at Color Me Mine in South Hills Village.

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A bowl is decorated at Color Me Mine in South Hills Village.

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A bowl is decorated at Color Me Mine in South Hills Village.

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A bowl is decorated at Color Me Mine in South Hills Village.

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A bowl is decorated at Color Me Mine in South Hills Village.

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A bowl is decorated at Color Me Mine in South Hills Village.

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A bowl is decorated at Color Me Mine in South Hills Village.

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A bowl is decorated at Color Me Mine in South Hills Village.

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A bowl is decorated at Color Me Mine in South Hills Village.

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A bowl is decorated at Color Me Mine in South Hills Village.

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A bowl is decorated at Color Me Mine in South Hills Village.

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A bowl is decorated at Color Me Mine in South Hills Village.

Getting enough to eat is far from a guarantee for everyone.

“There are so many people who are so close to food insecurity. You’re an illness away. You’re a job loss away. It doesn’t take much,” Sheryl Cohen said. “We think we live in a bubble here, but it very much exists in the South Hills.”

In her position as legislative assistant to state Rep. Dan Miller, D-Mt. Lebanon, Cohen often hears from local residents who struggle with providing for themselves and their families.

So does Stacey Reibach, director of community outreach for state Sen. Guy Reschenthaler, R-Jefferson Hills.

“We get calls from constituents who have to make choices between medicine for their family or food,” she said. “It pulls at my heart. So if we can do more as a community to alleviate that hunger component, then they won’t have to make those choices.”

Both women are members of Beth El Congregation of the South Hills, where they co-chair a social action initiative, Food for Thought. Their action came at the request of Steve Hecht, the congregation’s executive director.

“He approached us and said that he wanted to do some kind of mitzvah initiative,” Cohen said about the Hebrew word for “commandment,” also understood as “good deed.” “Stacey and I have both seen in our jobs the growing poverty in the suburban South Hills, and we think that hunger is an issue that everybody can get behind.”

To help raise awareness about the issue, along with money toward the cause, Food for Thought is presenting Empty Bowls South Hills, scheduled from noon to 2 p.m. Feb. 28 at Beth El, 1900 Cochran Road.

“When you go to the event, you get a meager bowl of soup and a piece of bread, and you get to pick one of these bowls,” Cohen explained as she, Reibach and about a dozen other women gathered to decorate pieces of pottery at Color Me Mine at South Hills Village. The paint-it-yourself ceramics studio provided the bowls at a substantial discount, she said.

Proceeds from the Empty Bowls event go toward local food pantries and the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank, which also benefited from a recent Food for Thought effort: the SNAP Challenge.

From Feb. 1-5, participants were asked to spend only $4 per person per day on food, representing the daily average of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, formerly known as food stamps.

In Reibach’s case, she donated the money she would have spent otherwise to South Hills Interfaith Movement, the Bethel Park organization that provides food, clothing and services to people in need.

“I strictly stayed with the $4,” she said, “but I planned out really healthy meals. It did give me an awareness that I had to spend a lot of time planning those meals.”

With that realization in mind, she came up with an idea for more effective food distribution – “Putting everything you need for a healthy meal into a bag, and putting a recipe on the outside of the bag,” Reibach said. “Just one-stop shopping to have some really good, healthy meal ideas.”

Food for Thought has other projects in the works, including food recovery – collecting unused, edible food from restaurants, caterers and others – and planting a community garden on Beth El property, with the harvest going to food pantries.

“We didn’t want this initiative to be just another food drive,” Cohen said. “We really want people to take an active participation in becoming aware of what the need is and participating in combatting it.”

For more information, visit http://bethelcong.org/meet-us/welcome/social-action/food-for-thought/ and http://bethelcong.org/events/emptybowls/.

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