Holiday Food Drive

It's September 1st, so you know what that means...it's Holiday Food Drive time! Okay not quite, but it's increasingly on our minds now as we approach the fall/winter months. Officially, any food drives conducted between October 1st and December 31st are considered Holiday Aid.

One of my second quarter goals is to work with Shared Harvest Foodbank staff and volunteers to coordinate the Holiday Aid Food Drive. I met with Holli yesterday to talk about what that entails. In the coming months, we will start fielding more and more calls for groups requesting help in launching their food drives. I learned how to process these calls and how to enter information into the food drive database on the Shared Harvest server. Soon I'll be dropping off and picking up barrels full of food with each agency conducting a food drive. I'll be doing this in Shared Harvest's big box truck (which everyone calls a van, but let me tell you, this is no van! It's huge!) Holli and I are working on syncing up our Outlook calendars to better coordinate this effort.

Another task with the holiday food drive will be to recruit more agencies, groups, churches, schools, etc. to host food drives this year. There are already a ton of groups who have donated in the past, so finding new places should be fun but challenging. If you are in the Butler County area and are interested in hosting a food drive for the holiday season, let me know! And if you don't live in the Butler County area, I hope you'll still host a food drive at your church, school, place of employment, etc. for your local foodbank. In these economic times, foodbanks and pantries all around the country are serving more people than ever, and they could use your help!

Yesterday, Tina was brainstorming slogans for the posters and fliers that groups can use to advertise the food drive, and I forget what exactly she came up with, but it was something along these lines: "Do what you can, give what you can--donate today." That pretty much says it all.