World Photo by Lou Sennick
Randy Brown moves one of 37 food donation barrels Wednesday morning, after affixing a poster for an upcoming food drive. The barrels will be placed at businesses in the Bay Area, and all the food collected will be delivered in a caravan to the South Coast Food Share location. The food drive will start Monday and finish with the Care-A-Van on July 11.
There's almost no end to community generosity on the South Coast when hunger is the issue. But the organizers of a new food drive have found one limiting factor when it comes to local businesses signing on to combat the endemic problem: they have too few food bins.
The Food Care-A-Van, sponsored by Oregon Coast Community Action, Coos Bay-North Bend Rotary Club and The World Newspaper, begins Monday. Forty businesses in Coos and Western Douglas counties have signed on to collect food in bins in their offices.
There would have been more, said Clark Walworth, publisher/editor of The World, but they ran out of places to put the food. The World is organizing the event.
"We could probably have 60 businesses, or 80 businesses if we had the bins," he said, noting that businesses can still join if they have their own bins.
After six weeks, donations will be loaded into vehicles that will form a caravan and wind their way through town to the South Coast Food Share, where Rotarians will unload the goods. From there, food will be passed to the 33 pantries in Coos and Curry counties, free of charge. A separate event will be staged in Reedsport to ensure donated food stays in that community, Walworth said.
Walworth gave credit to K-DOCK radio for setting an example by sponsoring the Bus Jam food drive in December.
"It's a tremendous program," he said. "But it doesn't cover the whole year. There needs to be additional help."
The drive ties in with ORCCA's Hunger Awareness Week, which runs from the Fourth of July through to the caravan event the following Saturday.
The week is designed to teach residents about food and nutrition and offer several ways for people to donate to the Food Share, said Hallie Winchell, development coordinator at Community Action.
There will be booths set up for Family Fun Day at Mingus Park for the Fourth of July, as well as the Dinner and a Movie program, where restaurants donate a percentage of proceeds.
The drive was set up to take place during the summer, a time of year when food donations can lag. From September 2007 through May 2008, 39,422 pounds of food were donated, compared to only 1,483 between June 1 and Aug. 30, according to Winchell.
There have been more food drives this spring, she said, which has helped with the increase in demand over the past few months.
Sharon Seiler, the Community Action food security childhood enhancement specialist, noted the caravan is unique.
"No one has ever done it before," she said. "Hopefully they can make it into an annual event."
The caravan of vehicles taking donations to food share is intended as a little twist to capture peoples' imagination, Walworth said.
"People donate because they care," he said. "I'm really excited by the opportunity to use the newspaper's power to reach people. It's a privilege to be involved in something like this."
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So glad to see local businesses joining forces to feed hungry families this summer. What a great idea! It just goes to show how a little help from each one of us can make a lot of difference when we pool it all together.
Being a Native of here and from the founding fathers, I have never seen it so that we have had to rely on the welfare to feed our families, you know in your heart of hearts that welfare is only a Fix, a band aid soon to deterioate, what can we do to get back on track here? What will we do with those appetites when the welfare cupboard runs dry? Mother Hubbard can tell you. Please help.
The World welcomes your comments about stories, and we encourage a robust dialogue on this site. All comments must meet reasonable standards of decency and civility.
Please follow these basic rules:
- No defamatory comments about individuals or businesses.
- No deliberately false information.
- No obscenity or racially offensive language.
- No harassment, verbal abuse, threats or personal attacks.
- No information that invades another person's privacy.
- No business solicitations or charitable solicitations.
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The World generally does not edit comments, but we reserve the right to edit any comment that does not meet our standards.
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