Hundreds of volunteers help with local food drive

Prince Albert’s Share-A-Meal Food Bank shelves are packed thanks to support from the community during weekend fundraiser.

This year’s 48-hour Great Canadian Food Fight and We Care Food Drive raised over a tonne more food donations.

Food bank co-manager, Wes Clark said they do several fundraisers throughout the year, but the Food Fight and Food Drive are their most important ones.

 “It’s huge, it gives us that big boost to get us going through the year,” said Clark. “Summer is always a difficult time, so our stocks run dry.”

Clark said several residents who struggle with food security rely on the food bank and without donations they wouldn’t be able to help.

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“We are so appreciative of the community and the support we get,” said Clark.  

Clark said this year they had more volunteers than ever before.

“We’ve probably had today [Saturday] alone, probably about 200 volunteers all together, so it was probably one of the first years, that I’ve been involved with where we’ve seen a driver for every route and that’s 40 routes so that was just incredible,” said Clark.

Clark said the volunteers drove to all areas of the city to pick up food that people were donating to the food drive.

Food Banks Canada purposely started the Food Fight on World Food Day, which was Thursday. This fight initially started in Feed Nova Scotia.

Clark said the fight is an initiative where food banks from across Canada compete to see who can collect the most food donations in 48 hours.

According to Clark some of the food bank’s largest donations came from, Farm Credit Canada with well over 2,000 pounds, River Bank Development Corporation which gave over 1,000 pounds and Jesse’s Garden who donated 1,000 pounds of potatoes.

Garth Ulrich said he’s on the board and this fundraiser is something they try and help out with every year.

 “We see a lot of need for the food, we don’t especially want kids to go hungry, so this is a way that we can help out and make sure that doesn’t happen,” said Ulrich.

 “We’ve seen an increased use of the food bank and what we have to offer here each month it seems like were giving out more and more food hampers and more and more people are coming in to take advantage of the afternoon meal,”  said Ulrich.

Clark said this was only Prince Albert’s second time taking part in the Food Fight, but they managed to raise a subtotal for the We Care Food Drive of 14,296.71 pounds.  This amount will be added to the 9,578.22 pounds for the Food Fight Challenge.

Prince Albert’s total for the Great Canadian Food Fight is 23,874.93 pounds.

For the full breakdown of donations visit the Share-A-Meal Food Banks site.

kbruch@panow.com

On Twitter : @KaylaBruch1