RadioRotary interviews Zamir Hassan, founder of The Hunger Van, a volunteer effort to bring food to the hungry homeless. In 2000, Hassan chaperoned a school trip to a local food pantry and was astonished by how many were going hungry in his prosperous New Jersey community. He says that in his tradition, you are not supposed to go to sleep if your neighbor is hungry, so he began to work on ways to alleviate the problem. As he traveled from place to place around the United States, helping to set up food pantries, he realized that many of the hungry homeless lack transportation to get to the food pantries, so he created a volunteer program that would bring healthy food to where the homeless lived, beneath bridges or in doorways. Hunger Vans now operate in cities all over the United States. Hassan was in the Hudson Valley to help inaugurate the Hunger Van program in Poughkeepsie.
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