Thanksgiving - charitable community projects

Parent Cafe
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<p>There’s already a wonderful, active thread for Thanksgiving recipes and memories.</p>

<p>Here, I’m posting to engage CC members to report about their local food distribution projects during the November and December holidays. </p>

<p>I just came home from a terrific, well-organized effort between two synagogues and a church, joining hands (and backs) to load up 500 Thanksgiving dinners to be delivered to needy families. Each meal consists of a frozen raw turkey plus fixings to assemble “all the sides” - potatoes, cranberry sauce, stuffing mix, brownie mix. Some people contribute grocery supplies, others write checks. In our suburb which has a significant geriatric demographic, there’s one grocery store (Wegman’s) that lets people accumulate points all year, to be redeemed for one free turkey. Many seniors shop but no longer cook a full turkey, so they redeem and donate their annual turkey to this project. </p>

<p>Volunteers assemble to distribute all the dropped-off items so that when someone drives up from a non-profit agency, they’ve already expressed how many bags they’ll need for their clientele. Each agency’s van or a private car drives off with 12 or 20 meals and their own address list for same-day delivery (today). </p>

<p>What I recalled while helping was a comment from a former first grade student who’d been a recipient of this same delivery. He said, on a Monday morning, “someone came to our house and brought us a Thanksgiving grocery bag. It’s because someone cares about us.”
I loved the “someone cares about us” because only a parent could have coined that phrase, and the child echoed it. </p>

<p>In conversation with my daughter, who also helped today, I said that poverty is an exhausting, daily struggle for many families, just to get through a day. A mere pause in that battle - a delivery of a grocery bag from community - is simply a relief. </p>

<p>Many thoughts and feelings.</p>

<p>What’s your community’s project?</p>

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<p>In Northern NJ, most grocery stores give you a free frozen turkey if you spend over $300 between late Oct-Thanksgiving. Yesterday, the Community Food Bank had a turkey donation drive around the area to collect turkeys that people don’t need (going to relatives, too big for smaller family, vegetarians, etc). </p>

<p>I picked up my free turkey yesterday and will be cooking it on Wednesday for our church, which makes over 100 dinners to distribute to the elderly & shut-ins on Thanksgiving. </p>

<p>A friend of mine used to run an emergency food pantry in Newark and noted that they receive lots of donations and offers to help around the holidays and they seem to be forgotten in January and February when the needs are still there.</p>

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<p>Not a Thanksgiving community project, but my coworkers will be making Christmas a bit brighter for another single parent, low income family, third year in a row. We are all chipping in money, shopping for the items on their wish list, wraping and delivering it all to YWCA to be sent to the sponsored family.</p>

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<p>The Boy Scouts here have a huge food drive in November. They distribute empty bags one one Saturday and come back the following week to pick up the filled bags. When S was in scouts it was his favorite activity.</p>

<p>We have several projects going on at church for Thanksgiving/Christmas. But we also collect food year round as the need is there all year, not just at the holidays.</p>

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<p>Community Food Bank of NJ collected over 4000 frozen turkeys on Saturday and 22000 pounds of other food!</p>

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<p>I love this project. They make it SO easy for us. Everyone has great stuff that they ended up not using for whatever reason (at my house it’s usually excess canned veggies :-). I’m always happy to see the bags. Our post office even did a similar drive where we could leave stuff and the mail carrier’s took the “goods” off to be distributed.</p>

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<p>Our local Knights of Columbus (KofC) chapter distributes a prepared dinner to elderly & shut-in people on Thanksgiving Day. Each year members of the parishes & people from the community bake a turkey & deliver it to the local KofC hall. Volunteers from KofC carve the baked turkeys, add the side dishes & distribute complete dinners within the community. My family got involved 5-6 years ago when our Boy Scout troop was asked to volunteer to bake turkeys and/or deliver food on Thanksgiving. (Our Boy Scout committee chair was also the chairman of the KofC Thanksgiving dinner program.)</p>

<p>I’m baking the annual KofC turkey right now - will deliver to KofC hall tonight. My house is starting to smell good :).</p>