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WPEC-TV CBS12 News :: News - Treasure Coast News - Report: 27% of Treasure Coast children go hungry daily

Report: 27% of Treasure Coast children go hungry daily

FT. PIERCE, Fla. -- A new study shows one in three in our area go hungry daily. The startling data shows the hunger pains in our region are getting worse for the smallest of victims.

The numbers to most may be shocking to think children are the ones left hungry, but it is a daily reality at the Harvest Food and Outreach Center.
From the outside the Outreach Center looks like a grocery store, but it is much more.

Vicki Hoyas/ Harvest Food and Outreach Center: We are the largest direct service provider on the Treasure Coast. Here on this campus in St. Lucie County we see over 600 families a day coming through.

Harvest Food and Outreach Center is trying to fill the plate in the world of hungry families.

Vicki Hoyas/ Harvest Food and Outreach Center: They qualify to come in here and get groceries at about a third of a cost of what you or I would pay at a traditional market.

Ebony Ross: I need this place. I am very grateful for it and all the opportunities I have to help me better myself because I have children that look up to me that I have to take care of.

Ebony Ross is trying to find a way out of job insecurity and to provide for her family. She's not alone. According to the Child Food Insecurity 2012 study, more than one in four, or 27.4 percent of children in Indian River, Martin, St. Lucie and Okeechobee counties are going hungry. Meals are skipped, food is rationed, with a choice made daily between eating, rent and gasoline.

Vicki Hoyas/ Harvest Food and Outreach Center: The most negotiable thing is food when you are looking at housing expenses, utilities, when you are looking at car payments, food is usually that thing that ends up off the table.

Ebony Ross: The reason I came to the program is things were really bad for me and my daughter.

Now Ebony learns about building her resume and nutrition. Without this program she says she'd be one of the 1 in 4 who defined themselves as people who don't know where they will find their next meal.

Vicki Hoyas/ Harvest Food and Outreach Center: They are not those who are generationally impoverished, but are really the working families who make too much to qualify for government assistance, so there's some hard choices that are faced by those families

Too high income for assistance, too low to pay the bills. In an area at 10.8 percent unemployment, the number one reason given for hunger, especially from children, is mom or dad lost their job.Report: 27% of Treasure Coast children go hungry daily

Monday, June 11 2012, 07:23 PM EDT

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