Cross Off Hunger This Holiday Season with Unilever #BetterTogether #CBias

My son came home from school and asked me why some kids don’t have enough food. I was taken aback by his question and the emotion in his wide, innocent four-year old eyes. How do you explain things like this to children? It’s a heartbreaking fact that kids even in our little community go to bed hungry.

Did you know that 1 in 6 Americans does not have access to enough food to sustain a healthy life? According to the USDA, nearly 17 million children are living in “food-insecure” homes. This lack of nutrition effects children, not only physically, but also the cognitive and behavioral development of children. These children are also not as able to do well in school. We’ve all skipped meals at one time or another; imagine trying to learn and thrive while experiencing the fatigue, concentration difficulties and irritability that go along with not having enough nutritional food.

It’s a widespread, overwhelming problem, but you can help this holiday season by learning about and supporting the Cross of Hunger initiative. We can all make a difference.

I would like to to meet Unilever, their family of brands, and the Cross Off Hunger initiative to donate two million meals to families in need. Unilever is involved with Feeding America (as part of Unilever’s sustainable living goal to help one billion people improve their health and well-being).

Unilever
The Unilever family of brands are household names; consumers around the world use these brands over 2 billion times a day. There are more than 400 brands of food and health products in the Unilever family, including: Q-Tips, Degree, Noxzema, Pond’s, Hellman’s/Bestfoods, Slim-Fast, Lipton, Wish-Bone, Tresseme, Rague, Lever 2000, Popsicle, Dove, Breyers, Bertolli, Suave, Knorr and Ben & Jerry’s.

Unilever creates products that help people not only feel good and look good, but they also provide brands and services that are good for them and others too! They strive to inspire people to make the small choices everyday that can collectively make a huge impact in the world. They are working to grow their brands and companies, while also reducing their environmental impact!

The Unilever family has a Sustainable Living Plan that is comprised of three main goals:

1. Improve Health an Well-Being
They will help more than 1 billion people to improve hygiene habits. They will also bring safe drinking water to 500 million people, thereby reducing the occurrences of life threatening illnesses.

2. Reduced Environmental Impact
The plan to reduce their environmental footprint by half. This includes the greenhouse gas impact of products during their life cycle, the water associated with the consumer use of products and the waste associated with the disposal of products. All of these cut in HALF!

3. Enhance Livelihoods
Their plan calls for sourcing 100% of the agricultural raw materials in a sustainable way. They will include 500,000 smallholder farmers and small-scale distributors into their supply chain.

Cross Off HungerUnilever’s Cross Off Hunger Campaign has partnered with Feeding America as part of Unilever’s Sustainable Living Goal to help one billion people improve their health and well-being. Unilever will donate more than two million meals to families in need with Feeding America.

Feeding America®, the nation’s largest organization dedicated to fighting domestic hunger through a network of food banks. $1 = 8 meals, secured by Feeding America on behalf of local food banks. Unilever will donate $250,000. The monetary equivalent of a minimum of 2 million meals will be donated.

What Can We Do?
Unilever is committed to donating more than two million meals to families in need with Feeding America and every item on your shopping list counts. Show your support by adding Unilever brands to your cart next time you shop. Together we can help to Cross Off Hunger.

We can create our own “Sustainable Living Plan” and use Unilever products in this plan! We can reduce the waste we create, conserve what we have and purchase from companies who share these values. And we can be an example for our children so that they can grow up doing the same.

In our house, we use many of the Unilever brands. We have Bertolli on our pasta, Q-Tips in our bathroom cabinet, Breyers in our freezer, Skippy on our sandwiches and both Dove and Lever 2000 in our shower! Those are the brands we have come to count on for our family.

About my son’s question, I decided to be honest with him. I told him that some families do not have enough money to buy the healthy food they need. I also told him about food banks that help out families that fall on hard times. Be sure to check back, I will be posting about how my kids made their first donation to our local food bank with Unilever products!

Please visit the MakingLifeBetter to learn about the growing problem of hunger and what you can do about it. You can take the hunger I.Q. Test, take a tour of a food bank, locate a food bank in your area and learn what the food banks really need.

You can also follow on Twitter and Facebook.

I am a member of the Collective Bias® Social Fabric® Community. This shop has been compensated as part of a social shopper insights study for Collective Bias™ and Unilever #CBias #SocialFabric