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Grind Out Hunger is voted Best Hunger Fighter in the Good Times Best of Santa Cruz 2009!!! I am so stoked that Grind Out Hunger is starting to get some real legs. Please email info@grindouthunger.org to get involved!

Here is the article retyped:

He’s local, he’s cool and he’s eager to get kid’s to know about hunger and how they can combat it. He’s Danny Keith and boy, is he on one heck of a mission. It began in 2004, when Keith, the owner of Santa Cruz Skate Shop and Santa Cruz Surf Shop, launched Grind Out Hunger. The idea was to speak to kids at local schools and “encourage youth in helping peers” with the issue of hunger.  Over the course of five years, he has motivated elementary, middle-school and high school students and their posses to donate food-hundreds of thousands of pounds of food at that. (You’d have to witness Keith’s amazing vigor in person to know just how infectious his personality is-he boasts 20 speaking engagements a year.) Last year, Keith nabbed the Generation Next Award from Second Harvest Food Bank, which he has partnered with in the Grind Out Hunger campaign-it runs alongside the Second Harvest’s holiday drive in the fall and winter. (Last year’s tally: 60,000 pounds of food.) Up next: Working with Second Harvest on “packaging” the model Keith uses here-speaking to kids-and allowing other food banks to utilize the program through media kits and DVD’s featuring some of Keith’s enigmatic verve.  “I just don’t think anybody should go hungry…there are more than 40,000 people a month going through Second Harvest and a large chunk are children,” the 39-year-old says. “Our future is our children…if we can educate and feed them. People shouldn’t go hungry but kids, they don’t have control over it.” (See grindouthunger.org) Greg Archer editor