Why we ran #BreakTheStigma

Something that kept coming up when we talked to families was that asking for help with food feels embarrassing, especially on the Eastside. On the surface everything here looks fine. People have nice houses, kids go to good schools, and from the outside it can be hard to tell a family is struggling. But some of them are. More than once we heard that families held back from using food banks or asking for resources because they didn't want to be seen doing it, or didn't feel like they had the right to ask when their neighbors seemed to be doing so well.

That's a specific kind of problem, and it is harder to fix than adding another donation site. So in December we ran a short social media campaign around the hashtag #BreakTheStigma. The idea was to say directly that food insecurity is not a personal failure and that nobody should have to feel ashamed for asking for help. It got picked up by Pack News (the Eastlake student paper) and reached around 2,000 students at the school.

We didn't know it would spread the way it did, and a few students reached out afterward, which we weren't expecting either. We honestly can't say whether it changes how people think about asking for food. But the conversation felt worth starting, and we are still figuring out how to keep it going without it turning into a campaign just for the sake of running one.