Every year my company holds a Volunteer Week. The company does a fantastic job of proactively identifying volunteer opportunities throughout the year for those who are civic-service minded. But then in late September, they do a big push to get every employee across the nation to volunteer in their community. There’s an entire website to connect volunteers with projects . In the Bay Area alone, there were over 25 projects for employees to sign-up.
I picked the one closest to my home. I’ll admit that I was a little disappointed that it meant that I’d lose three hours on a Saturday morning. Yes, I was being selfish with my time. I’m a busy working mom with weekends that can be more stressful than my meeting schedule. I’d much rather have found a community service project that was in the morning during the week… might as well kill two birds with one stone and get a break from work while serving my community. But alas, I picked convenience of the local over my desire to play hooky at work.
And on last Saturday, I showed up to the Second Harvest Food Bank with 20 other employees of my company to bag produce for needy families in my community.
In three hours, our group of twenty bagged over 750 3-lb bags of carrots. These carrots weren’t like the carrots you’d see stacked all perfectly in Whole Foods. These carrots were broken in half or triple the size of a carrot you’d see in the store. The food bank has a deal with local farmers to buy the carrots that wouldn’t be “sell-able” in a regular grocery store. Whatever carrots were deemed un-safe for human consumption, we threw into a bin that went to a local pig farmer. No carrot went to waste that day.
At the end of the three hours, I felt like I had really accomplished something for my community. Until I heard that our 750 bags wouldn’t even survive a few hours at a local food pantry. Second Harvest Food Bank serves over 200,000 Bay Area families every MONTH. That’s over 6500 families a day. Our Team Leader told us that with the economy in bad shape, they see more and more families each week. There are people in our community who have to pick paying rent over buying groceries. That there are children who go hungry on the weekends as their only meal is the free lunch they get at school. It was heartbreaking.
Suddenly that one grocery bag of food I brought to donate seemed like a pathetic attempt to show my support for my community. I was thrilled when I learned that Second Harvest has partnered with companies and local farmers to make donations stretch even farther. For a $15.00 donation, Second Harvest can buy 350 pounds of fresh fruits and vegetables. At my local Farmer’s Market, that would buy 7 pounds of peaches.
So I’ve marked it in my calendar to regularly go shopping for my community at the Second Harvest website. I can make a single monetary donation that Second Harvest uses as they see fit. Or I can virtually shop, knowing exactly what my dollars are buying and how far those dollars are stretching to feed my community. It still may not be enough. But by spending a mere three hours at the Second Harvest Food Bank, I realized that there is so much more than I can be doing.
Original post for the Silicon Valley Mom's Blog
