MANNA Nourish Awards Set For Sept. 20

Have you ever entered a room with no idea what to expect, only to leave it completely floored and utterly inspired?

My name is Bryne Yancey, and I’m the new social media strategist at Hashtag Multimedia. My job is to ensure our clients’ voices are being properly conveyed and promoted via their blogs, Facebook, twitter, tumblr, Pinterest, you name it. I’m having a great time so far, but I don’t particularly care for self-promotion in my writing (I’d rather help others than self-serve) so I’ll stop that now.

The only reason I’m qualifying this blog post is that yesterday I went to my first shoot since starting at Hashtag, at MANNA in Center City. We’re working with them on some great video content about their mission, as well as the upcoming MANNA Nourish Awards, which has become an important annual event for them. This year’s iteration happens Sept. 20 at the Loews Philadelphia Hotel, located at 1200 Market Street. More info is here—please consider purchasing a ticket—and a video from last year is below.

When you visit the MANNA headquarters and talk to the folks who work there—not to mention the volunteers who create and deliver over 70,000 meals per month to their 1,200 or so clients—it’s hard not to walk away feeling inspired. These are great people doing important work in the greater Philadelphia area, helping people with cancer, HIV and other serious illnesses recover more swiftly by ensuring that they’re eating regularly and nutritiously. Simply put, if patients aren’t eating healthily, their recovery will be hindered and the time, money and resources put into the research, studying and manufacturing of medications and treatments will be all for naught.

“Food is medicine” is MANNA’s motto and has been for the past twenty years. I witnessed it firsthand yesterday, as we spoke to clients who have had their lives and physical conditions markedly improved by utilizing MANNA’s free service that creates and delivers three meals a day, seven days a week, in addition to creating relationships between their clients and their dieticians/counselors that are just as crucial. It’s a staggeringly arduous task, and one for which MANNA should be applauded.

More about MANNA, from their website:

“MANNA nourishes the mind, body and spirit of clients, volunteers and supporters alike. Drawn from all walks of life, the young, old, urban and suburban come together with one common goal: to promote wellness through nutrition for people at acute nutritional risk living in Eastern Pennsylvania and Southern New Jersey.

Formed in 1990 by members of the First Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia, MANNA is a 501(c)3 non-profit and is non-sectarian. MANNA provides essential and specialized services to men, women and children living with HIV/AIDS, cancer and other life-threatening illness.
MANNA offers opportunities for caring people to provide loving support to families, friends, and neighbors, MANNA enables local families and individuals to be more independent as they learn to cope with a serious illness.
Financial support comes from corporations large and small, foundations, faith communities, the public sector, special event fundraising, and individuals.

  • 7,349,135+ meals served to date
  • MANNA serves children and adults, individuals and families
  • MANNA delivers meals and nutritional counseling to home and clinic settings
  • 85% of MANNA’s clients are African-American or Latino
  • More than 85% of MANNA’s clients are very low-income by Federal HUD guidelines
  • Enough yearly delivery miles to circle the globe 6 times
“Our primary goal was to express, on behalf of the community as a whole, the love and care we would all want if any of us were in similar circumstances. The physical food was the gift, but the repeated assurance that the community cared was the real message.”     -Kenwyn Smith, A MANNA founder

Service
Now in its twentieth year of service, MANNA offers home-delivered, medically appropriate meals to help boost the body’s ability to fight serious illnesses, provides education and counseling to help clients make intelligent nutrition choices, and offers compassionate human contact that links consumers in need with caring community volunteers from all walks of life. Together, these free services help people with a life-threatening illness maintain their independence and live longer, healthier lives.”