I want to take the opportunity to thank the members of my Advancement Team, especially Tom Strother, who was the LSS communications director, and others who worked with us during the years of the food bank’s rapid growth, for their extraordinary and exemplary work. Their efforts paved the way to enable the LSS Second Harvest food bank to grow from 6 million pounds distributed and $400,000 raised in 2004-05 to nearly 23 million pounds and more than $2.5 million raised in 2012-13.

It was an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have been a part of herculean efforts to improve the quality of life for people who are struggling in our community. The momentum of our collective efforts from 2004 to 2013 will enable Feeding Northeast Florida to eventually surpass 23 million pounds of food distributed and head toward the 40 million pound goal established by LSS.

The team rose admirably to the challenge of educating the community about why people may be hungry and inspiring the community to take an active role in solving the issue. We were fortunate to work with fantastic community partners – private foundations; major corporations; city, county and state government leaders; and thousands of individual donors and volunteers – who put their money to work to help us achieve great goals from which Feeding Northeast Florida is now benefiting.

In the way of the circle of life, the mantle for distributing large amounts of recovered food has moved on from LSS, and, since then, LSS can take credit for identifying and helping Farm Share fill another gap in service in our community – gleaning and distributing fresh food straight from Florida’s fields, which had not been accomplished on a large scale in Jacksonville before. In addition, LSS, with the help of its Lutheran network, has turned its focus to food and nutrition programs that get services directly to people in need.

Those of us who served on the LSS Advancement Team during this tremendous growth have moved on as well, to take our hard-earned knowledge of how to engage people to other sectors of our city. In the end, LSS has fulfilled its primary objective to serve and care for people in need and continues in its quest to fill gaps in services needed to help these people. We are all better for LSS’s work. We all stand on the shoulders of those who have put their hearts, souls and talents to work for others.