It’s that time of year when ShareNet kicks off Neighbor Aid, our annual fund drive in partnership with Community News.

Though the seasons come and go, there is no finish line to ShareNet’s work in our community: fighting hunger, malnutrition, poverty, and homelessness in our own backyard. Your support in 2008 has allowed ShareNet to provide emergency food to about 8,000 individuals in 2009, and distribute $25,000 in emergency utility and rental payments for our neighbors threatened with loss of sustenance, heat or home.

This year ShareNet saw increases in a new demographic: people who’d never been to a food bank or in need of public assistance before and situations where a job loss had more profound consequences than ever, sometimes leading to the loss of a home.

Many are too ashamed to tell their neighbors or even family their stories, but we hear them when they come for help. ShareNet is meant for exactly such emergencies and focuses its resources and your donations on the hardest hit. ShareNet serves residents of Kingston, Hansville, Port Gamble, Indianola, Eglon, Little Boston, and some in Poulsbo and Suquamish.

Just as there is no finish line at ShareNet, the recession is not over for most of us, including the most vulnerable in our community. They will feel its effects longest, and their recovery will be slowest. There is no magic solution to the force of poverty and malnutrition, and ShareNet must continue the fight every day and draw upon every resource to meet the huge increase of customers we’ve had in the past two years.

ShareNet needs your help to continue successful operations. A donation to ShareNet is one of the fastest ways to have a direct hand in problem solving and crisis relief right at home, closer than you ever imagined. There are few donation scenarios where your dollars go to work more quickly, more directly, or more locally.

There’s a direct line between a donation, winning this daily struggle, and a better community.

Where there is adequate nutrition, children have their best chance at optimal development and learning, and their best chance at contributing positively to their larger community as they grow.

That goes for adults too, as we know now that development and learning are lifelong. Where there is less poverty, there is less crime. Community improvement is infectious; one act of community support generates another act, and another, until brick by brick, donation by volunteer hour, a community is remade, and a problem such as malnutrition shifts.

Your donations allow ShareNet to be a safety net for some, a lifeline for others, and a force in community improvement for all.

In 2009 ShareNet won a prestigious honor in Washington’s community of hunger and poverty-fighting agencies, Food Lifeline’s Excellence Award for Community Resource Development, an award designed to “recognize strategies that raise awareness of hunger and develop resources to address it.” We didn’t win that award alone; we won it because we have the support of a strong community that recognizes the growing need ShareNet is striving to meet.

A community that believes hunger is an important issue affecting everyone, not just the child who can’t concentrate and is falling behind at school due to malnutrition, not just the single mother who heats her home with the kitchen stove because it’s the only heat source, not the senior who must make rent a priority over eating this month, but all who know these people or live near them.

If you don’t struggle personally with these issues, it can be easy to regard those who do as separate, belonging to another community that doesn’t resemble your own.

But we know that our North Kitsap communities don’t believe in that kind of separation, or in turning a blind eye to the problem, preferring not to see it. We know that North Kitsap believes in including everyone in whatever prosperity our community enjoys. We know that North Kitsap does not believe in reflecting the national statistic of one in eight people in the United States being underfed.

We know this because North Kitsap helped us serve 8,000 people this year, and prevented hundreds of others from losing their heat or their home. A successful fundraiser one year is just that, it helps cover one year of expenses.

With deep gratitude for your help in the past, we ask you to consider a donation this year.