Welcome back! I hope you had a wonderful time over the holidays with your loved ones and are ready to get back into the swing of things. I know I am!

As I mentioned last year at this time, I’m not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions. It feels cliché to make big plans and promises because the year on the calendar changed. We have all the best intentions, but most of us fail. And once we slip, we just walk away until next year. Yet something about the fresh clean calendar beckons. It’s the one time of the year when we collectively look at the future and wonder what it will bring us. We feel the weight of the financial and dietary strains of the holiday season and we hope that the new year will be better than the old – that we will be better than last year.

So last year I gave in and set some New Year’s resolutions that were focused on others instead of myself, and although I failed to meet the details of the goals I set for myself, I still feel that the exercise was helpful. All year I had this goal in front of me. All year I had this on my mind. I didn’t hit all the marks, but I did some good things.

My resolutions for 2015 were:
– Have a Food Shelf Friday dinner 50 of 52 weeks in 2015 – we hit 40-something. I stopped counting after the second one we missed…
– Pack meals at Feed My Starving Children 6 times in 2015 – we went twice as a family and I went once with a group from church.

Clearly I did not accomplish my goals. BUT…

– Our 40-some FSF meals mean 40-some families got a meal from the local food bank, my family kept the hungry on the front of our minds, and we did all this without going over our usual grocery budget

– Twice this year my family spent its togetherness time helping rather than spending or eating, and we helped pack thousands of meals.

Those are good things! And I learned a few things that will make 2016 even better. Getting my little family of three together for a whole evening is hard. Between Scouts, sports, church commitments, jobs, and school, we’re stretched. BUT, a packing event at Feed My Starving Children doesn’t have to be a whole family evenhttps://foodshelffriday.com/about/t. I can go on an afternoon by myself, or just J and I can go during the day in the summer. I really held myself back waiting for all the pieces to fall into place for my whole family to have an evening to dedicate to FMSC.

So, my resolutions for 2016:

• Have Food Shelf Friday dinners 45 of the 52 weeks of the year.
• Participate in packing events at Feed My Starving Children 6 times, with or without my family
• Attend at least one hunger-related fundraiser
• Volunteer at least 50 hours to hunger-related work (not counting the time I spend blogging)
• Participate in some variation of Hope for Dinner twice in 2016 (the week before Easter and the week before Thanksgiving)

So I tried, and I learned and grew and stepped up my game for the new year. I’m calling that a win!

What are your resolutions for the new year? Share them in the comments for accountability and to inspire the rest of us!