MADISON, Wis. (WMTV) - With 2022 coming to a close, you still have time to help those in our community experiencing food insecurity.

You can help reach that goal with a donation to the NBC15 Share Your Holidays campaign. Thanks to the buying power of Second Harvest Foodbank of Southern Wisconsin, $10 can provide up to 25 meals.

After the NBC15 Phone-A-Thon, more than 3.9 million meals were raised. We’re now only 300,000 meals away from reaching our goal this year.

The date of our Final Meal Reveal will be released soon.

Help us meet our goal of raising five million meals for families facing hunger in our community.

One in 13 people in our community are food insecure, including one in eight children. Together, we can help feed people in our community.

How it started

What began on that cold winter day 26 years has grown more than Mike McKinney, who died in 2006, may ever have dreamed. Blossoming from a campaign that found success in the thousands of meals in a year to one that, with your help, brings millions of meals to people in southern Wisconsin.

“You know when I started here, it’s like ‘how do I follow in Mike’s footsteps?’ To know that even if they were smaller than Mike’s, we made a difference is really the capstone of a career thanks to all of you who have stepped up,” NBC15 News anchor John Stofflet said when he surprised with this year’s ‘Be Like Mike’ award.

NBC15 late anchor Mike McKinney accepts a donation at the first NBC15 Share Your Holidays in... — NBC15 late anchor Mike McKinney accepts a donation at the first NBC15 Share Your Holidays in 1996.(wmtv)

Through the Years

In the more than a quarter-century since the Share Your Holidays campaign began, the number of meals provided by the drive has grown many times over. Originally, and for more than a decade, goals could be measured in the thousands through today. Then, in 2009, the Share Your Holidays campaign crossed one million meals for the first time and never looked back. Now, just 13 years later the goal has increased another five-fold.

In all, an estimated 63 million meals have been raised, according to Second Harvest and now each campaign makes up about one-third of the meals Second Harvest provides in a year.

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