By Mary Owen
Postal Carrier Food Drive
Saturday, May 11
Place non-perishable food contributions
(no glass containers, please) next to your
mailbox prior to your normal mail delivery time.
Postal carriers will collect.
Top 10 food items needed are:
Shelf-stable dairy; soup;
peanut butter; tuna; vegetables;
fruit; pasta; flour; cereal;
tomato sauce
When mail carriers stop at mailboxes on Saturday, May 11, they are hoping to find more than outgoing letters and bills.
They hope they will be a bag of nonperishable canned food, box and other items placed by the mailbox.
Bags of food collected in and around Stayton on May 11 for the 21st annual National Association of Letter Carriers Stamp Out Hunger Food Drive will boost donations to the Stayton Food Bank and Marion-Polk Food Share.
“People look forward to it, and so do we,” said Edna Rickman, food bank director. “It’s just an extra help at time we start to run out of help from the holiday drive. Last year, we got more than 3,000 pounds of food from the mail carriers. That was really good!”
Although the number of families using the food bank is leveling off, Rickman said, “There are still a lot of people out there who need food. I hope people understand if their kids get subsidized school lunches or they get food stamps, they automatically qualify to get food from us.”
The Stayton Food Bank is currently serving about 250 families a month. To qualify, a person’s gross income must be less than $1,771 a month, and $620 for each additional household member.
“Right now we have a good supply of Jewish food from Passover,” Rickman said. “We have lots of canned green beans and corn, and we just bought some peanut butter. We have one refrigerator plumb full of eggs.”
Food donations to the NALC drive should include tuna, canned meat, chili, side dishes, condensed soups and beans, she added.
NALC letter carriers hope to double last year’s total due to increased need to help feed families in their communities. The drive is the largest one-day food drive in the country.
“My goal is to raise approximately 50 percent more food than we were able to raise last year,” said Nick Boston, food drive coordinator for local Branch 347. “The letter carriers chose this time of the year for the food drive because it is traditionally the low point of the food bank’s inventory.”
Boston said all the food collected in smaller communities such as Monmouth, Dallas and Stayton will stay in those communities for distribution. Food from the larger communities will go to the Marion-Polk Food Share, some of which comes back to the smaller communities, he added.
“It is such a huge help to us and is also our largest one-day food drive,” Lindsay Adamson with Marion-Polk Food Share said. “Because of the drive, we are able to distribute more food and able to help even more families through our agencies. We are so thankful for the sacrifice of time and energy that our letter carriers give. We know it adds a lot of extra work to their day, and we couldn’t be more grateful. We are so excited to have their support again this year.”
Last year, a total of 105,445 pounds of food was donated in Marion and Polk counties, which included the 3,100 pounds in Stayton. This year, Marion-Polk Food Share estimates it will distribute 9 million pounds of non-perishable food through nearly 100 direct service charities, helping families in the two counties.
More than 110,000 emergency food boxes and more than 710,000 community meals well be provided, helping to feed some 14,000 children each month, according to the MPFS website.
“We are serving an average of 9,437 families a month, which is up from last year’s 9,020 families a month,” Adamson said. “More than 16,000 children are eating from a food box every month.”
Boston said as a letter carrier, opportunities to help others is limited during the day, but this provides a way to help those in need.
“My two favorite times of the year have always been Christmas and the Food Drive,” Boston said. “People at those times of the year are very happy to give and to receive.”
Marion-Polk Food Share receives 59 percent of its food from local donations, and Boston said the drive makes it “unusually easy for the general public to donate simply because we deliver to everyone. All one has to do is place their bag of food by their mailbox.”
Protein items such as peanut butter and canned tuna are most needed, Adamson said.
“Shelf-stable dairy, canned soups, canned fruit and vegetables, canned tomato products, cereal and flour are all wonderful items we can use,” she added.
“We would like to encourage everyone to leave what they can. We will accept all types of food items except those in glass containers,” Boston added.
