The Better Together Food Drive Campaign organized by Hillcrest Church has succeeded its goal raising limit.
“Right now we are sitting at $36,500 plus all the additional food that has arrived; we weren’t expecting food so it is safe to say that we did meet the goal and succeeded it this year,” said Moose Jaw and District Food Bank program development manager, Jason Moore.
The Food Bank will have a clearer total amount [in a few days] as monetary donations are still trickling in.
A little over 4,000 pounds of food has also been delivered to the Food Bank since the Better Together Food Drive Campaign started.
“We apologize if there was any confusion this year with the Better Together Food Drive Campaign. Hopefully next year we can return to the door-to-door Halloween night campaign but we will see where COVID-19 restrictions go and what they will allow us to do at that time,” continued Moore.
Food Banks Canada uses a calculation whereby 1LB of food is valued at $2.60 per pound.
“We hand out about 25 pounds of food per hamper of non-perishable donated food. The Better Together Food Drive Campaign has collected about 3 months of food hampers for us,” said Moore.
On average, the Moose Jaw Food Bank serve about 950 clients each month to those in our community that are in need.
“So from day to day we distribute about 20-30 hampers and in a week somewhere excessively [at about] 120 hampers per week,” said Moore.
“At the onset of COVID-19, our numbers dropped a little bit and we contribute that to people receiving the CERB money, and as CERB is now ending and the funds are no longer being provided we have seen a dramatic increase in the past month,” explains Moore.
The Moose Jaw Food Bank is still accepting monetary donations until the end of this week for the Better Together Food Campaign.
Casino Moose Jaw [just recently] donated $10,000 to the campaign.
“It was a matching donation where they matched dollar to dollar of donations up to $10,000.00,” said Moore.
The Moose Jaw Food Bank’s new location at 270 Fairford street West is over 3x the size of the old building.
“In our previous building we didn’t have any space for a warehouse to store pallets of food so we always rented semi-trailers and utilized church gyms until we could get the food all sorted out and organized into hampers, which took several months. Now we have the ability to hold up to 60 pallets of food and [the ability] to handle all these large food drives which we are excited about, and wished we could have done this year [but weren’t able to due to COVID precautions],” said Moore.
“I want to thank Hillcrest Church and their team of wonderful volunteers who delivered door hangers to every home in Moose Jaw. A huge thank you also goes out to our community who supported us with monetary and food donations. I also would like to thank Casino Moose Jaw for their generous contribution of $10,000.00,” continued Moore.
