BC Thanksgiving Food Drive
On September 17th the Abbotsford Food Bank had the honor of being participant and beneficiary of the first ever BC Thanksgiving Food Drive. After having tremendous success in Edmonton & Calgary, the Church of Jesus Christ & Latter Day Saints decided to put their hands & heart to raising food, funds & awareness for Food Banks across the entire province of British Columbia. Drawing in local businesses and other faith groups for a strong and united effort, we were blown away as they and our many generous members of our city joined us in our mission to nurture family & cultivate community through our supplemental food hampers and other supportive programs.
See the below letter from this year's organizer,
"Thanks you so much for your great work and cooperation on Saturday! The final count of food collected at the Abbotsford location on Saturday was 9,868 lbs! This far exceeded our expectations. We are so thankful for the wonderful support from the Abbotsford Food Bank from beginning to end on this initative. Thank you for going the extra mile and changing your work day from Friday to Saturday. Having your team work side by side with all the other volunteers was absolutely wonderful. We never could have done it without your team there. The efficency of the operations was incredible. It was amazing to see so much food gathered, sorted, boxed and loaded onto the truck and all completed by early afternoon. This is trully a model that would be well worth sharing with the other food banks and collection sites.
Many comments have come back about how glad people were to be able to participate. The generosity of the comunity was incredible. Inspite of the rain the average return rate for Abbotsford was 13% (13 homes left food for every 100 bags dropped off). I think we covered roughly 30% of houses in Abbotsford. The volunteers that participated absolutely loved the experience. It was great to see volunteers from several different organizations in the community working together for a common cause.
For your information the total food collected in all of BC this weekend was 247,605 lbs.
We've learned a lot this year that will help us next year. We are planning on significantly increasing the number of routes next year. Feedback we received was that it was much easier to do a route (avg size of 15) than people originally thought."
If you wish to partner with us in the 2012 BC Thanksgiving Food Drive, please contact us.
