Hi friends, Raymond here.
Every quarter, Leket’s numbers come to me from Israel and I pass them on to you, because your gifts are in them. Before the numbers, I want you to meet one of the people on the receiving end of them.
Jonathan, in the town of Jesse Cohen
Last month we posted a short video of Jonathan, filmed in the Jesse Cohen neighborhood on a distribution day. Behind him, people were pushing grocery carts past tables and filling bags. His English is not polished, as he will tell you himself, but you will not need it to be.
Jonathan grew up in Jesse Cohen. As a boy he went the way too many boys there go, into drugs and crime. At 25 his life turned around. At 30 he married, and he now has four children. When he came back to the neighborhood as a father he saw what he had lived as a child: nobody was looking out for the kids. So he opened a place for them. Six years on, it feeds 450 families every week, runs Rosh Hashanah and Passover dinners for 120 people who would otherwise have nowhere to eat that night, and hosts dinners and parties for adults with autism.
Leket is the supply line. Once a week our truck leaves large crates of produce at Jonathan’s door, and soup with them. Volunteers break the crates down into bags, a bag of onions, a bag of potatoes, a bag of whatever else came that week, and the families cart them home.
When we asked what the families say, he said we need to hear it ourselves: “Without you, the refrigerator would be empty. With us, it’s full.”
Jonathan’s center is one of 346 partner charities Leket supplies. Every number below is a crate at a door like his.
What arrived at those doors, July to September
575,460
17.9M lbs
185,271
In three months we distributed 575,460 meals and more than 8,000 metric tons of fresh fruit and vegetables, close to 18 million pounds. We also provided 185,271 servings of soup and shelf-stable dishes, the “good soup every week” Jonathan talks about.
Volunteers play a vital role in harvesting and sorting produce gleaned from over 500 Israeli farms.From July to September, 10,973 volunteers we bussed out to farms and gleaned nearly 1.3 million pounds of fresh nutritious vegetables. Another 6,634 people volunteered in Leket Israel’s logistics centre.