Wow this cuts like a knife. I've never been poor, but this hurts to imagine, especially with two little kids at home that rely on me. What is the best way to help this, what charities/activities?
Most always need volunteers. Depending on the place, it can either be more effective to donate money or food. Some places have affiliations with larger collecting centers which just charge the individual pantry handling (usually something like $0.10 / lb) for food; if a place doesn't, they might prefer food donations because otherwise shopping is one more thing a volunteer needs to find time for, and they won't get a particularly better value than you.
If you want to shop for a food pantry, it's best if you ask them what they're currently short on, but in general it will be your proteins and fruits, because both tend to be more expensive than the vegetables and carbs, and a lot of people donating to food pantries are giving what little they can. You'll mostly end up giving a lot of a few good staples that are reasonably priced - tuna, canned chicken, apple sauce, peaches - but if you throw in a little variety every now and again (spam, blueberries) you'll really make someone's day, who's been eating the same damn thing for longer than they can remember.
Dried beans are cheap but not very popular, because they're a bit more time consuming to prepare. Don't donate cranberry sauce, every food pantry has a shelf full of it. Large packages of food (20 lb bags of rice) are tricky; they're usually cheaper, but then the pantry has to repackage it, which is more work, less appealing, and introduces more risk of food contamination. Buy generic canned vegetables, but name brand cereal. Being poor is no-name cereal from a plastic bag, and you'll make some kid's week if they get to eat actual Cheerios for breakfast, but no one cares what label is on their can of green beans.
If the food pantry near you is well stocked on food, you can load them up with personal hygiene supplies - toilet paper and toothbrushes, but also deodorant, laundry detergent, feminine products, and diapers. Most places will also give out pet food; that is usually safe to buy a 50 lb bag of, because people are happier to take a gallon ziploc of dog food.
It should be noted that some charities are drowning in unskilled labour, and that folks shouldn't take it personally if they're turned away. Help in some other way, like you say, with money or food.
A friend of mine offered to volunteer at a nearby charity and was miffed that they turned her away since she had no management experience; they had plenty of hands, but really needed folks with organisational skills to manage them.
Even if they don't need more volunteers on the regular, most places won't mind if you join a couple of shifts, just to get a feel for how they operate.
Ultimately, you just have to find a place and start talking.
People will try to work to make their lives better, whether they're "poor" and "rich". Not needing to worry about food and shelter would make life much easier.
And I mean "basic income" for everybody. Not just citizens. Even immigrants. "For the widow, the orphan, the foreigner." - Deuteronomy 10:18, Zechariah 7:10, Matthew 25:31-46
That's just math. Your moral feelings may have to take a back seat to pragmatism, here.
You are just angry we want you to contribute at all and I feel bad for you. It must hurt going through life thinking no one cares if you suffer or die.
And so you get angry at people on the internet that suggests it should be mandatory.
Top three things we struggled with.
1) eliminate poverty, wherever the cost of living isn't over-inflated. I'm okay with 'SV has to robotize everything because no humans can afford to work menial jobs there, so they move away', but we're looking at a world where no humans can afford to be other than rich, anywhere.
2) guarantee a customer base for anyone and everyone who does choose to start a business or enterprise. I have studied my own sole-proprietorship business over more than a decade, and my prosperity has been TIGHTLY linked to the FED labor share of income. To put it bluntly, as my business is not in the FIRE sector, I do well when 'people have money to spend', and when they don't it's like trying to squeeze water from a stone.
We do not have a capitalist economy without a broad consumer class, and in the era of the FIRE sector and automation, without something like a basic income we don't have a consumer class at all, and everything dries up from the roots up. Playing games with financial instruments can only mask this for a very short time.
Basic income isn't just a social justice thing: it's the only way a free-market capitalist system can continue to be the 'blind arbiter' of what goods and services prevail. Either you switch over to a centrally governed assigner of who does what work, or you continue to have a free market through feeding it with money at the consumer level, literally paying people to function as your 'free market' and thus not having to give that function to the government (public or private).
The time where this system naturally turned business employment into wages producing a social class system that was stable, was back when worker efficiency was orders of magnitude less than it is now. That was when humans had to do sums on paper, dig ditches with shovels, to get anything done! It's still within living memory of some older humans.
Those days are gone. There will never be a class system in a modern automated, mechanized, solar-powered world, that can support a capitalist free market, without basic income. I would stake my life on that proposition.