A newly released report by the Michigan Fitness Foundation (MFF) shares findings from 260 Michigan food pantries, including nine Free Methodist churches.
The report, on emergency food distribution, gardening and nutrition education, is a study of opportunities and barriers to improving the diets, health and well-being of emergency food recipients at Michigan’s 3,100 pantries, over 80 percent of them operated by communities of faith. The study was commissioned by MFF and conducted by Barna Research of Ventura, California.
The voices of 260 organizations with food pantries are represented in the final report. Twenty-eight of these are organizations in the Holiness tradition, including at least nine Free Methodist churches, four Nazarene churches, three Wesleyan churches, one Church of God (Anderson, Indiana) congregation and one Salvation Army church. An additional 46 Methodist organizations responded to the survey, including at least 34 United Methodist churches.
Two of the report’s lead authors, Justin Fast and Maran Subramain, attend Central Free Methodist Church in Lansing, Michigan. Fast is a Conference Ministerial Candidate with the East Michigan Conference of the Free Methodist Church – USA.
To download the report and sign up for future updates related to this work, visit: http://michigannutritionnetwork.org/survey-michigan-food-pantries/.