It’s been a few days now from the food drive, and we are still buzzing with excitement about what just happened - $4,780 raised to provide two weeks of groceries for 24 families. We want to thank everyone who made this possible.
Starting at 8am, we had four shoppers scouring the aisles of Superstore filling cart after cart to the brim with groceries and transporting everything to our sorting facility. All told, we filled 22 carts chock full of groceries in the process of getting everything sorted.
Starting at 9:30am, we had four volunteers help set up the grocery sorting areas and organize the groceries as they were delivered. This was a task that really could have used at least twice as many volunteers, but they powered through the blistering heat to make sure that all the groceries came in, and then all the groceries went back out to our recipients.
Starting at 1pm, our army of 13 drivers started arriving to pick up the groceries and deliver them to our recipients. Due to the limited number of drivers, most had to make two deliveries, and many had to wait patiently in the sun during the heat of the day as they waited for their cars to be loaded.
This food drive was such a big undertaking, that it could not be contained just in the garage, and we had to annex sections of the back yard area in order to have enough room to operate. The generosity of a few members of our community in lending us the use of their canopies saved us hundreds of dollars in rental or purchasing costs.
Did we mention that we raised $4,780 for this food drive??? We’re still pinching ourselves over this. Seeing our community rally around the most vulnerable of our families, and then to see people outside of our community recognize what we were trying to do and rallying around us on top of that… It is an incredibly humbling experience and we are not sure we will ever be able to demonstrate our thankfulness enough that we get to be a part of this.
The following is just a partial list of food items that we were able to purchase through everyone’s generosity
55 gallons of milk
74 loaves of bread
90lbs of pasta
100lbs of carrots
112lbs of frozen ground turkey and frozen ground beef
150lbs of fresh chicken
220lbs of potatoes
250lbs of frozen veggies
440lbs of rice
1,140(!) eggs
Finally, due to storage limitations, we had to store all 55 gallons of milk in two kiddie pools filled with ice and water to keep them at the desired temperature. For three weeks before the food drive, Jonny would - three times a day - freeze 84 ice cubes at a time in ice cube trays and then transfer them to the deep freezer. His daughter Lydia (4) was quickly enamored with this process and below is a timelapse of just one of the times she commandeered the ice cube trays.
All told, we made just over 5,000 ice cubes
This is an amazing time to be a part of the YFMV community. If you aren’t a part of our community, and you’d like to join, check out our Facebook group, and then join our website (hint: you’re already here 🙂 ). As long as we are continuing to grapple with the effects of COVID-19 in our society, we will have those in our community who need our help to get through this difficult time, so we expect that we will be gearing up for another food driver later on in the year. Finally, we have some exciting new features that we’re looking to roll out for our community over the next couple of months, and we can’t wait to see how we take the next step towards growing the YFMV community!
