Paige Kieffer
Sun Sailor
August 7, 2015
Over 1,200 riders participated in the 49-mile Tour de Tonka ride on Aug. 1 that had over 3,200 participants. Tour de Tonka bikers ride through Shorewood during the August 1 ride. Over 3,400 riders participated in the Aug. 1 ride that began at Minnetonka Education Center in Depphaven for the 100-mile ride and at Minnetonka High School for all other races.
By Will Hoverman
Sun Sailor Newspapers
August 3, 2015
Tour de Tonka is right around the corner as the area preps for the massive bike-ride fundraiser occuring Saturday, Aug. 1.
Tour de Tonka, known by some as “Minnesota’s Ride,” has grown to host
more than 3,000 riders from across the country since its conception a decade ago. Riders can choose from six different distances: 16, 28, 49, 57, 77 or 100 miles.
“Bicycle riders participate because Tour de Tonka is pure fun,” said Tour de Tonka Director Tim Litfin. “All ages and abilities – from families and recreational bicyclists to cycling teams and serious athletes – enjoy what Tour de Tonka offers them.” In 2014, riders came from 204 different communities, 52 Minnesota counties, 20 states and two countries.
The celebrated ride has much more than just the cycling. There are 14 rest stops along the way with food, music, rest and conversation. Dozens of volunteers help make the event a success. From door prizes, live bands, food vendors and charity drives, this event has grown to become a West Metro staple. “It’s all about the rider,” Litfin explains. “Tour de Tonka is unlike bike rides in the state and in the Upper Midwest.”
Tour de Tonka’s routes move through 24 different communities including Chanhassen, Chaska, Deephaven, Delano, Eden Prairie, Excelsior, Greenwood, Independence, Long Lake, Mayer, Minnetonka, Minnetrista, Mound, Navarre, Norwood-Young America, Orono, Plymouth, Shorewood, Spring Park, Tonka Bay, Victoria, Waconia, Watertown and Wayzata. All of these locations offer scenic views of beautiful roads, trails and most of all, lakes.
The 100-mile ride begins at 7 a.m. from the Minnetonka Community Education Center on Vine Hill Road in Deephaven. The 16, 28, 49, and 77 mile rides begin as before from Minnetonka High School at 7:30 a.m. Pre-race day registration and packet pick-up are available at Minnetonka High School on Friday, July 31, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. On race day, parking at each location opens at 5:30 a.m. as does registration and packet pick up.
Louis Ricard of Wayzata has been participating in Tour de Tonka since the beginning, earning him the title of “Legacy Rider.” He admires just how much traction the event has gained. “It’s grown from a handful to over 3,000 riders now,” he said. “I think the breadth of how many different types of competitors is great too. You get old riders, young riders — I think there’s a 74-year-old riding this year. It’s also really cool to see families, groups and organizations participate. Sometimes you see some people with 30-40 members wearing the same shirt.”
Ricard also emphasizes the sense of community felt at the event. “There’s a whole element of camaraderie at the end of the race with pizza, music and so on. It’s really a great end to a great day,” he said. Tour de Tonka partners with the ICA Food Shelf to combine fun with
charity. A percentage of the registration fee is donated to the ICA. Riders are also encouraged to donate food or money on or before the day of the event. In 2014, Tour de Tonka provided $5,980 for the ICA. To date, the ride has raised over $36,000 to support the local food shelf.
Whether you are looking for a family-friendly day of recreation or an intense athletic expedition, Tour de Tonka provides both.
Raymond Grumney
Star Tribune
June 22, 2015
Suburban and rural poverty jumped 92 percent from 2000 to 2013 while it grew 24% in the core cities, according to a new Metropolitan Council report. The Metropolitan Council defines poverty as 185% of the federal poverty threshold ($44,093 for a family of four in 2013).
Stephanie Helseth
Sun Sailor
Lakeshore Weekly News
February 28, 2015
ICA Food Shelf Executive Director Peg Keenan welcomes guests to the third-annual Sizzle for a Cause at Bayview Event Center Feb. 19. The cooking competition features west metro chefs who are challenged to cook with a mystery ingredient announced at the last minute. The restaurant with the best dish takes home the coveted Golden Cleaver award. Proceeds benefit the ICA Food Shelf. Tim Mahoney, Rachel Hutton, Jeff Edmondson, Paul Douglas and Rusty Gatenby served as guest judges.
Samantha Garretto
Lake Minnetonka Magazine
February 2015
Ron Kamps of Minnetonka is no stranger to a full workweek. The former director of worldwide sales and marketing at Control Data Corp. (now Seagate) spent a large part of his life serving in high-profile leadership positions at a number of worldwide companies for more than four decades. Now Kamps fills his days with a different kind of work: volunteering for nonprofit organizations around the Minnetonka area for more than 40 hours per week.
Kamps’ passion for volunteerism started in Arlington, Minn., where he grew up in a community that was a proponent of hard work and giving back. After working his way through high school and college, Kamps entered the business world at 20 years old. His career took off and took him around the world to experience diverse cultures. Eight years ago, after more than 40 years working for worldwide organizations, he decided he had flown enough miles and was ready begin his next chapter: retirement.
Retirement has given Kamps an opportunity to dedicate his time to serving others by following a model he believes to be the key to a successful community. “First you learn, then you earn, then you serve,” Kamps says. “This is how a community survives.”
Faith has also played a large role in how Kamps provides service to others. A discussion with his pastor helped him determine what his talents were and where to invest them, which is how Kamps landed at the Intercongregational Communities Association Food Shelf in Minnetonka a few months after he retired. “The ICA is where it all began,” Kamps says. “God has given me the gifts… I am humbled, honored and blessed to help.”
Kamps began his volunteer legacy with the food shelf by picking up and delivering food, and his business background helped him feel at ease building relationships with the people he encountered as his involvement grew within the organization. “I learned who people were and what their needs were,” Kamps says. He now serves on the executive board of directors and is vice president for the ICA.
Peg Keenan, executive director of the ICA Food Shelf, recognizes that Kamps has a special touch when it comes to making connections inside and outside the organization. “He seems to know everyone,” Keenan says, “and those he doesn’t know seem to know him and will come up to ask him what ICA needs or how they can help.”
Including his work with the ICA Food Shelf, Kamps dedicates 40 to 60 hours a week to the community. He has served as a board member on 14 organizations and helps write grants for the Minnetonka School District. Organizing special events, and coordinating speakers and mentors for students are but a few of his contributions as a member of the district. “He is very humble about all the help he gives ICA Food Shelf and many other organizations in the community,” Keenan says.
Brian Tichy, president of the Minnetonka Diamond Club where Kamps serves on the board, refers to Kamps as a “multi-faceted individual” who coordinates and executes special events to help the club reach their fundraising goals. “We had a car wash in the fall,” Tichy says. “The business [we worked with] volunteered to donate their entire revenue—not just profit, their whole revenue—that day to the organization. Ron coordinated it.”
“He has this connection with businesses,” Tichy says. “He’s out in front, a leader, a front man. He will bring people in.”
Kamps also enjoys making community involvement a family affair. He’s been married to his wife, Elaine, for more than 50 years, has four children, 11 grandchildren and one great-grandson, who attend fundraising events and contribute to their community. Even his grandchildren have taken after their grandfather’s dedication to serving others. “My granddaughter volunteered for a six-month internship with ICA,” Kamps says, “and all five of my grandchildren in Minnesota volunteer for the food shelf as well.”
Kamps attributes his success to the people he works with who make it all come together. “I am part of a team on all these organizations, and they aren’t successful without everyone working together,” Kamps says. “I’m just a member of the teams and humbled to be part of them to help our community.”
Stephanie Helseth
Sun Sailor
July 31, 2014
ICA Foodshelf Executive Director Peg Keenan spoke at the grand opening celebration for the newest ICA Foodshelf site on K-Tel Drive in Minnetonka July 22. The ICA Foodshelf began operating in 1971 and has since expanded to two individual locations and a mobile food shelf. The project cost approximately $565,000 and Steiner Development renovated the space at 11588 K-Tel Drive. Fundraising for the Capital Campaign is still active.
Tracie McMillan
National Geographic,
July 16, 2014
Her face was small and pitiful: a brown-eyed, blond-curled toddler, eyes darting, lying on a doctor's table. First we saw her belly, rounder than her skinny legs would suggest, prodded by a physician. And then the camera pulled back, showing the filthy, caked bottoms of her feet.
The year was 1968, and the child was a subject of "Hunger in America," a CBS Reports documentary that aired amid President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty. Other scenes showed sharecropper families with rat-infested bedding, and Mexican-Americans too hungry to move.
That was the face of American hunger in 1968. The girl was one of ten million Americans considered hungry, a number equivalent to 5 percent of the population. Most of the hungry lacked jobs, and the unemployment rate of 4 percent nearly tracked the rate of hunger. But however dire that hunger was, it was marginal, with 1 in 20 Americans going without food.
Today, nearly 50 years later, hunger in America looks very different.
The biggest difference between hunger in 1968 and today may well be sheer numbers: In 2012, 49 million Americans struggled with hunger, according to the USDA. That's 16 percent of the population, nearly double the then unemployment rate.
For the sake of comparison, that translates to 1 in 6 Americans. Much of that, say experts, can be attributed to a change in how we measure hunger.
In 2006 the USDA traded the term "hunger" for "food insecurity," shifting the focus from whether people were literally starving to whether staying fed was a problem. Researchers had traditionally measured hunger through physical symptoms, like stunted growth and being underweight. Now they began asking Americans whether they were ever actually hungry: Had they missed meals, worried about running out of food, or gone to bed hungry.
Measuring food insecurity rather than hunger has led to a startling new picture of America, says Janet Poppendieck, a sociologist at Hunter College whose recently re-released Breadlines Knee-Deep in Wheatexplores the link between hunger and agricultural policy.
When it comes to America's hungry, says Poppendieck, "they're not hungry all the time; they just can't count on not being hungry."
In New York City's Bronx borough, more than one-third of the residents and nearly half the children are food insecure. Even so, the people who show up at food assistance programs there may surprise you, says Christopher Bean, executive director of Part of the Solution, a nonprofit that runs a soup kitchen and food pantry in the borough.
"The most common misperception comes back to the idea that the individuals ... who are food insecure are ... street homeless," says Bean. Part of the Solution sees those people, he says, but its clientele "is families, it is mothers with baby strollers, it's people with cell phones."
Today the hungry are almost always employed, a sea change since the 1960s. In 2012, 60 percent of all food-insecure Americans lived in households with a full-time worker; another 15 percent lived in households with a part-time worker.
It is now so common for people to be both employed and hungry, says Bean, that in 2011 Part of the Solution added Saturday hours to its pantry in hopes of serving more working families.
This year the nonprofit decided to expand into evenings and possibly Sundays for the same reason. "We've seen the trend of more and more working people struggling with hunger," says Bean. "We're changing our program delivery model to accommodate them."
At its base, modern hunger is a problem of income, says Christian Gregory, an economist with the USDA's Economic Research Service.
In June, Gregory and two colleagues published a report about food insecurity in postrecession America, listing the three biggest predictors. The first was unemployment and a sheer lack of income: If you don't have a job, you're more likely to lack food.
But the next two predictors of food insecurity were variations on the theme of low wages. One was inflation, which in this context means the failure of wages to keep up with the cost of living. The other was rising food prices. Indeed, even though more people had jobs, food prices rose enough that they couldn't necessarily buy more food with their wages.
And that too is a significant difference from 1968. Today the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. In nominal terms, that's a huge raise over the $1.60 on offer in 1968. But adjust for inflation—for rising health and housing costs, for the skyrocketing cost of education—and 1968 looks much better. That minimum wage, today, would equal $10.94.
When it comes to hunger, said Gregory, "it really matters how much income is available to people."
Tracie McMillan is the author of The American Way of Eating and a senior fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University.
Lake Minnetonka Magazine
May 2014
Think back to the last time you ate an apple, peeled a potato or sliced a pepper. Did you wonder what journey it took to get from farm to store to you? When eating pineapple in the dead of winter requires just a trip to the store, it’s easy to forget where our food actually comes from. Two local churches are aiming to change that, while providing for those most in need.
Six years ago, Judy Gregg watched An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary about Al Gore’s campaign to make the issue of global warming known worldwide. For the sustainability committee at St. Luke’s Presbyterian Church in Minnetonka, the film was an inspiration. They knew they had to act, but how? In January, 2008, a class with Terry Gips from the Alliance for Sustainability, a nonprofit based in Minneapolis, led the church to form a group focused on environmental issues. Their first priority was restoring the dry compact soil on the church’s property. “Going with the land was the most affordable way to start,” says Gregg. Because of their focus on sustainability, the church wasn’t interested in conventional agricultural practices. They began exploring the use of permaculture design for the church’s garden. “Permaculture is a design system that looks at what nature does. It’s learning from nature,” says Gregg. “You won’t see monoculture in nature. You’ll see plants, trees, animals living harmoniously.”
Pesticides and fertilizers aren’t used in St. Luke’s garden. Instead, plants that benefit and enhance each other are purposely grouped together in what are known as plant guilds. Herbs and flowers are planted to attract beneficial insects. All of the fruits and vegetables from St. Luke’s garden are donated to ICA Food Shelf in Minnetonka.
In the first year, the garden produced 550 pounds of produce. By the third year, the garden yielded more than 1,000 pounds. Gregg attributes the growth to improved soil conditions. But for St. Luke’s, the garden is about more than the amount of food. “We are trying not only to provide to the food shelf but to also get people connected with the land, to bring them outside,” says Gregg. Last summer, the church hosted an open garden event and invited the community to learn about permaculture and good gardening practices. “It was a great time,” says Gregg. “The kids got involved, as well as their parents. Some of these kids and adults were astounded by what broccoli looked like growing.”
Mount Calvary Lutheran Church’s garden began with a need. Four years ago, the Excelsior church started the New Friends Community Ministry, which offers a free, volunteer-run monthly meal to anyone in the community. As attendance at the meals grew, the church asked what else they could do that was connected to feeding. They decided on a garden.
Christopher Anderson, director of community outreach at Mount Calvary, spearheaded the program, applying for a grant through Hennepin County’s Gardening Matters program. They also receive support from the Mount Calvary Foundation. Mount Calvary has donated 1,000 pounds of fresh produce from the garden to ICA over the last two years. Anything extra has gone to the New Friends Community Meal. Volunteers, including church members, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, as well as the curious, tend the gardens. “Some people will randomly walk by and offer their help,” says Anderson.
Like at St. Luke’s, Mount Calvary staff members have observed that the garden reunites people with the land. “It’s really helpful for everyone to understand that we can take seeds and grow,” he says. “We have a resource—our people and our land. It’s not a huge resource, but we have it. It’s just another way of sharing with the community what the church is about.”
Stephanie Gonyou
Sun Sailor
March 11, 2014
Larger space will allow for larger client base
The ICA Food Shelf in Minnetonka will soon be able to serve more people more often with the expansion site now under construction on K-Tel Drive.
The groundbreaking ceremony for the new site was held Monday, Feb. 10. The ICA had been using the site for warehouse space in the past. After realizing it had potential, the staff decided it could be used for things bigger than storage.
The current sites serve more than 800 families each month, adding up to more than 1100 food services each month. The ICA is able to provide between 40 and 50 pounds of food for each individual per visit.
Since the new 13,400-square-foot site is considerably larger than the current site, the ICA will continue to store bulk donations there as well as serve their clients. Public relations and communications specialist Laura Swenson is looking forward to having everything in one place.
“The logistics are simplified and efficient and saves us money, which helps our clients,” Swenson said.
At the K-Tel site, clients will have the opportunity to participate in a choice model food shelf. With a choice model, clients will still be provided a list of nutritionally-sound groceries to bring home, but they will have options between a variety of choices instead of being given one item without input.
The current prepackaged model practiced at the ICA provides clients with a certain number of specific types of products based on the families’ needs. There are A-bags, B-bags and C-bags, each bag containing a different set of groceries. Clients are sent home with the combination of bags that will best suit their needs.
Executive Director Peg Keenan believes offering a choice model to clients will provide them with a sense of self-respect that they can’t feel otherwise.
“People feel a greater sense of dignity when they get to select their own food,” Keenan said.
Clients who prefer the anonymity of the prepackaged model can continue to visit the St. David’s Road and Mount Calvary Lutheran Church locations. It’s important to Keenan to have both options available.
The mobile food shelf service will also continue serving clients that are disabled, elderly or for some other reason can’t make the trip.
At the K-Tel road site, clients will have the opportunity to visit three times each month instead of once or twice like at the current locations. This will provide them with more access to fresh produce and, in turn, a healthier diet.
According to the Hunger in Minnesota Campaign, a project working to close Minnesota’s gap in missing meals and a general hunger problem, 600,000 Minnesotans are missing 100,000 million meals every year.
While the ICA acts as a supplemental grocery provider and doesn’t have the ability to fulfill a family’s entire grocery need, the staff at the ICA Food Shelf is happy to be a part of the solution. The ICA Food Shelf works independently from the Hunger in Minnesota Campaign.
The new site will be open later than the current sites, and Keenan believes this will help the ICA reach more people. The convenience of later hours makes it easier for people with obligations during the day to stop by on their way home.
The main goal of the food shelf is to help their clients through a tough time. Swenson is confident expanding their campus will reinforce that mission.
“Our goal is to get people back on their feet,” Swenson said. “If they’re unemployed or underemployed – if we can help in any way to get them out of that, that’s our goal.”
Starting a Capital Campaign was one of the first steps to the expansion process. This allowed for donors to make pledges spread over a course of a few years. One donor, Keenan said, made a three-year pledge.
Keenan said they need $565,000 total, and have raised all but $32,000.
The new site will open whether or not the rest is raised before the grand opening, but she said any donation counts and can help them achieve their goal of helping more people each year.
Construction at the new site should wrap up in late April, and Keenan expects to have it running in May.
Matthew Hankey
Sun Sailor
February 15, 2014
Minnetonka City Council member and Hopkins Schools teacher Patty Acomb creates a ceramic bowl with the help of Hopkins High School students Jayme Ratliff, left, and Lauret Wilson. Feb. 5 at the high school for the 16th annual Empty Bowls fund raiser to be held next month. This year’s event is 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 11, at the Hopkins Center for the Arts, with all proceeds going to benefit ResourceWest and ICA Food Shelf.
