High school senior Jake Prokopets started his own hot dog stand about a year ago. He usually serves customers at the local Family Dollar, but on Tuesday, he set up at Granite Street Park in New London.<\/p>\n
\u201cI get a pretty wide variety of customers,\u201d the 17-year-old said.<\/p>\n
After hearing about the government\u2019s shutdown\u2019s impact on SNAP, Prokopets decided to take things into his own hands.<\/p>\n
He has a goal of serving 1,000 free hots dogs to kids whose families are experiencing food insecurity and say the park is a good location.<\/p>\n
\u201cI could really only think about the kids and how they couldn\u2019t provide for themselves,\u201d he said. \u201cSome of them probably don\u2019t eat if there\u2019s no school. School lunch might be their only meal. So why not? Why not do something about it?\u201d<\/p>\n
He said he plans to serve hot dogs again on Saturday, Nov. 8 and Sunday, Nov. 9 from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. at Granite Street Park and will continue as long as he can. The park is located at 165 Broad St. in New London.<\/p>\n
Just down the street at the Gemma E. Moran United Way Labor Food Center, Prokopets said they\u2019re seeing high need due to the government shutdown.<\/p>\n
The facilities serves 65 food program providing agency weekly.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve seen their need increase and especially in the last year,\u201d warehouse associate Karl Magnuson said. \u201cAn agency that used to do 150 people through the door is now looking at like 350.\u201d<\/p>\n
The center\u2019s Vice President Annie Stockton said every day is different and they are preparing by taking it one day at a time.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s just really holding onto that hope,\u201d she said. \u201cWhatever the crisis may be, nationally, federal. We do have this local group of folks that comes together.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"High school senior Jake Prokopets started his own hot dog stand about a year ago. He usually serves…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":549606,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7757],"tags":[748,393,4884,257,19959,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-549605","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-london","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-england","10":"tag-great-britain","11":"tag-london","12":"tag-new-london","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115494354028132596","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=549605"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549605\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/549606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=549605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=549605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=549605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}