Healthy Over Hungry Cereal Drive Campaign

• June 11, 2019
• Staff

EL PASO, TX –The Hospitals of Providence and Providence Children's Hospital, along with General Mills and other partners have teamed up for the 5^th annual Healthy over Hungry Cereal Drive Campaign (HOH Cereal Drive).

HOH is an annual Cereal Drive benefitting El Pasoans Fighting Hunger Food Bank to help provide breakfast food to food insecure children in our community. The Hospitals of Providence and General Mills have set a goal of collecting 400,000 servings of cereal through June 14.

The annual Cereal Drive kicked off on June 7 with a Cereal Eating Contest at the Children’s Hospital. Forty participants from the Hospitals of Providence and sponsoring partners competed in the contest. William Gardea of Davita Dialysis Center won the title of Cereal Eating Champion.

“Participants compete to see who could eat a bowl of cereal as fast as they can and as silly as they can to bring awareness”, said Nicholas Tejeda, Group CEO for the hospitals of Providence. “One in three children goes to bed hungry at night we’re trying to solve that problem together.”

Earlier this month, Ysleta Independent School District, a HOH Cereal Drive partner, collected 87,000 cereal servings. The total number of servings collected exceeded the 2018 collections by 50,000 servings!

"We have a vested interest in this event, our students are fed daily throughout the school year. We want to make sure we do our part during the summer," said Alan Crawford Director of Child Nutrition for the Ysleta Independent School District.

El Pasoans Fighting Hunger Food Bank (EPFH) is El Paso's only food bank and a participating member of the nation’s largest hunger relief network, Feeding America. Where a current 22.3% of the community’s population living below the poverty threshold.

In 2018, El Pasoans Fighting Hunger, through, 130 partner agencies, distributed 15.5 million pounds of food in El Paso, Hudspeth and Culberson counties.

For more information about El Pasoans Fighting Hunger, visit the web-site at elpasoansfightinghunger.org.