Richest county in the country…
Lowest unemployment rate in Virginia…
Highest median household income in the nation…
And yet in spite of the soundbites:
16% of our Loudoun County Public School students qualify for free or reduced price school meals.
Our senior citizens are increasingly at-risk as housing prices and cost of living rises while their incomes remain fixed.
Almost 20% of Loudoun’s nearly 131,000 households live at a subsistence income level.
So here we are, and here we have been since 1991. Loudoun Hunger Relief distributed 2.6 million pounds of food through 355,000 service instances to Loudoun residents in FY20 (July 2019-June 2020). We can tell you that almost 40% of the individuals we serve are children under 18. Another 13% are senior adults. The people we serve are the working poor, who live well under the estimated subsistence household income level. (See the United Way’s ALICE Report for stats and details at https://www.unitedforalice.org/virginia)
The hungry in Loudoun are those you’d expect: seniors on fixed incomes, immigrant families, low-wage service workers, those experiencing a housing crisis, a medical crisis or a mental health crisis. But there are also people you wouldn’t expect: Federal workers in the midst of a shutdown, the neighbors who have lost one or both incomes temporarily due to Covid, the person next to you at church or in traffic on Rt. 7.
The truth is that hunger is just below the surface, or one or two paychecks away, for up to 26,000 households in Loudoun County. The work we do at Loudoun Hunger Relief is life-giving, hope-giving, critical work. Thank you for being part of it.
