Editorial: Giving back is part of appeal

More than $120,000 has been raised in both food and money during the past two appeals. Photo/Thinkstock.

It is easy to settle into a comfortable existence and assume those around you are enjoying similar good fortune.

Easy to forget the times in your life when it was not so easy. The days, the weeks, or perhaps the years, when just breaking even was a battle.

Young Tauranga mother Emma Jane-Jones, who featured in the Bay of Plenty Times Weekend, has no illusion about how tough life can be.

She vividly recalls how she felt when, down on her luck and struggling to feed her family, she had to visit the Tauranga foodbank.

While grateful for the support she received, the experience hardened her resolve to improve her situation.

She recently completed a three-year teaching degree while also holding down a fulltime job.

The future now looks bright for Ms Jones but she shows no signs of forgetting the hard times.

Her family usually gives a little to the foodbank and the Women's Refuge throughout the year but decided to do something more when they read about the Bay of Plenty Times Christmas Appeal.

They went to the supermarket, did a grocery shop and took it all to the foodbank.

Her reasoning was simple.

"We've got a roof over our heads, we've got new cars and food in the cupboard and our kids are taken care of.

"There's not much more we need," she said.

It is people like Ms Jones who make the foodbank appeal such a success.

More than $120,000 has been raised in food and cash for the foodbank during the past two appeal campaigns.

The foodbank gives out about 7000 food parcels each year, which works out to be up to 30 a day.

The sheer number of parcels given out suggests there is a real problem in our community with families living below the breadline.

But, as Ms Jones and many others have shown, we can do something about it.