Community Food Drive

[Roger]

Look for your Flyer which will be delivered to your home .. We will be holding our 2nd annual Community Food Drive the week of April 9th, 2007. This event is sponsored by all local churches on behalf of the Lethbridge Food Bank.

Volunteers will drop off flyers and bags starting April 9th or 10th. Then on Saturday Apr 14th if you wish to participate, leave your donation in the bag on your doorstep. Between 9am and noon we will come collect your donations. Thanks, eh

more info to follow

[Roger]

Saturday 14 Apr 2007 - Helped with the 2nd Annual Magrath Community Food Drive today. Arne Jensen started this project back in Calgary and started it up here in Magrath last year. Since then, several other communities have also started their own food drives based on his model. It is well supported by the entire community and has had very good results.

- Flyers are printed up explaining the project along with a bag to put the food drive items in
- Volunteer groups are pre-assigned to specific blocks
- They drop off the flyers and bags in the week before the pickup day.
- No doorbells are rang - they just leave flyer and bags at the doors.
- On the pickup morning (Saturday) donations are left out on the doorstep in the supplied bags for pick up by 9:00 am.
- The volunteer groups collect any items left for donation
- No doorbells are rang - they just pick up what is left out.
- The collected items are brought to a common drop off point and loaded into trailers.
- The trailers are driven to the Food Bank and unloaded.

I helped with the advertising and worked at the drop off point in the Seniors Center parking lot on Saturday morning. They had two big trailers (Calvin Heggie and Wes Olsen) waiting to be loaded up. I brought a few dozen empty boxes from the Pharmacy to help. Arne Jensen and Ron Williams were also there to help (5 loaders). About 9:30am the first groups started to appear. We mostly pre-sorted the cans vs everything else into bags and boxes and loaded the trailers as best we could. If too many cans are loaded onto other items, they can get damaged and are unusable. It gets a little busy when everyone shows up about the same time. Shortly after 11:30 most groups were done and the trailers were 'full'. Then we drove to Lethbridge Interfaith Food Bank to make our delivery. They have some boxes to put things in, but the delivery bay quickly gets full. We had everything inside by 1:00pm and drove home. They will weigh in the results and give us a total number of pounds donated. They estimate that the value to be around $2/lb. Although we don't have the actual figures yet, they think we received even more than last year. Kudos to Magrath and to Arne Jensen.