William Acker of Miami wants to recruit you.
He wants to recruit you to your local soup kitchen and volunteer your services. That's because the vast majority of soup kitchens, some ninety percent of them, rely on volunteers to do what they do. And so William Acker of Miami has learned to happily make a nuisance of himself, urging his friends and colleagues to give up a few hours of their time to help out at the local soup kitchen.

The soup kitchens of America perform a valuable service, says William Acker of Miami, by providing free meals to people who are down on their luck and have fallen through the cracks of the social safety net. He has great empathy for such people. "There, but for the grace of God, go I," he says. "One of my best friends growing up – he dropped out of sight not long after we got out of high school. None of us saw him for more than a year. We finally found out that he had some kind of breakdown – I still don't know the details on that – and had been living on the streets for most of the time he was missing."
When he learned about what had happened to his high school friend, he rallied a group of old classmates to get their friend the help that he so desperately needed. But the experience changed William Acker of Miami; it taught him that the homeless can happen to almost anyone. "All it takes is a run of bad luck," he says.

Every day, millions of Americans go hungry, say William Acker of Miami. "The numbers are staggering, once you begin to delve into them. More than twelve million kids, and twenty-two million adults in the United States live in homes that face food insecurity every single day. Do you know what that means? I didn't, when I first heard the term. It means that they don't have enough money to meet their most basic food needs – let alone pay the rent and the electric bill. And all it takes is one little piece of bad luck, like losing a job, and they're out on the streets."

Since he began volunteering at his local soup kitchen, he has been surprised to learn just how ordinary most of the clientele there are. That has inspired him to keep coming back, and to urging others to do what they can to relieve hunger and other emergency situations. And that is why William Acker of Miami wants to recruit you.

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