Stamp Out Hunger

Last Saturday, Taylor and I helped at the Stamp Out Hunger food drive with the National Association of Letter Carriers (aka the post office). Before I go too much further, I'd like to point out that I am a Stamp Out Hunger veteran. I volunteered with this food drive in Urbana back in 2004, so I had to sport my old t-shirt for the occasion.

My 6-year anniversary with Stamp Out Hunger!

The food drive basically worked like this: on the second Saturday in May, people all around the country put bags of food by their mailboxes. Letter carriers picked up the food along their routes and brought it back to the post office. A group of volunteers then met the letter carriers at the post office and unloaded the food from their trucks. We put the food into giant boxes on pallets, which were then loaded into a giant trailer and taken to Shared Harvest.

To get a better idea of the process, here are a few pictures:

Stamp Out Hunger in Fairfield was a family affair! Here are Alex's parents assembling a giant box for food collection.

When a truck pulled in, we jumped into action, ready to unload the food onto the carts.

Inside, volunteers transferred the food from the bins into the giant boxes.

When a box was full, the guys loaded it into the trailer for delivery to the foodbank.

The Stamp Out Hunger food drive is so cool because it is a nation-wide project. I read online today that this year's drive yielded 19,724,393 pounds of food across the country, with 1,000 post offices yet to report their totals. That means that this year pushed the 18-year campaign over the 1 billion pound mark. One billion pounds of food!

For more info and pictures of our local efforts in Fairfield, click here for Alex's account of the day!