La Conner Weekly News - Your independent hometown award-winning newspaper

Thursday, the 17th, you can make your mouth happy, your spouse or partner happy, the owners of one of five of your favorite La Conner restaurants and chefs happy and in the process do a fleeting good deed for poor people. See the ad on this issue’s back page. Find a restaurant participating, eat out and take a BITE for Skagit. It is a small way to do a little bit of good. So go. Eat out.

Take a BITE for Skagit is an annual May Foodie Fundraiser benefiting Community Action of Skagit County’s Skagit Food Bank Distribution Center.

It is organized by North Coast Community Credit Union, which works with Skagit Eats.

The Weekly News is a 2018 sponsor.

Participating restaurants throughout the county are community partners.

They are donating a percentage of their Thursday gross sales to Community Action of Skagit County.

Those dollars will buy produce from local farmers.

The purchased fruits and vegetables will be distributed through Skagit County food banks and meal programs, “providing the bounty of Skagit County” to the one in five residents that annually use a local food bank.

La Conner’s Sunrise Food Bank is included.

If you are not a voluteer already and your schedule and workload allows it, join the many committed folks making the Sunrise Food Bank go, week in and week out. Your neighbors and friends are helping feed your neighbors in this, our hometown. Some of your neighbors and friends are being helped out, stretching their food budgets by tapping into the food bank.

People going hungry in the midst of plenty, in this, the wealthiest nation ever, is a true story throughout our country. Your donations of time, food and money are only a start to solving the tragedy of hunger, and homelessness. This paper’s position, which it will enact for its staff once revenues allow, is a $15 an hour minimum wage on the way to paying livable wages.

The surest solution to poverty remains good jobs at good wages. Poor people go hungry because they don’t have sufficient income to buy food. They are homeless because they lack the income to rent or purchase.

The only way to reduce poverty is to pay people more. I look forward to reporting the day staff at the Weekly News get a raise, boosting them to a decent wage.