my company's hawaii food bank drive

for the past three years, i've been helping to organize a food bank drive at my company. from my estimations, i think we raised about 2,300 pounds of food!

from the start, we had an idea of buying our can goods cause a lot of the engineers didn't really have a lot of spare can goods lying around in their homes. so we raised some money and went to costco. we did some calculations and bought a lot of vienna sausage, because it had the most weight per cost and it was a meat product. the food bank has a top five wish list canned meats first, then canned meals, then soups, vegetables, then fruits.



anyway, so the first year (2006) we bought 50 something cases of vienna sausage. here is what that looks like. being engineers we had a lot of fun making different formations of the vienna sausage blocks. and no it didn't fall down.



this year we tried to kick it up a notch. and we did! we raised a record amount of money and i think we'll actually donate much more food than previous years. but, food is a little more expensive this year. for example, vienna sausage went from $6.44 to $6.99. anyway, like i said we raised a lot more money this year. so we bought vienna sausage, pork and beans, tuna, soup, stewed tomatoes, and corn. we piled all that up into two trucks and brought it back to our office. here is some pics from this years food drive



its always a lot of fun the organize these sorts of things. the great thing is that i'm always really blown away by my co-workers generosity and willingness to help. i have some of the best co-workers ever (and i'm not just saying that)! our employee culture of giving and helping is really quite inspiring!

here are some hunger facts from hawaii food bank

The Hawaii Foodbank network serves 131,862 different people annually

The needy face tough choices: 32% have had to choose between food and rent or mortgage bills, 27% between food and medicine or medical needs .

48% of all clients served by the Hawaii Foodbank are classified by the U.S. Government's official food security scales as experiencing hunger.

Among households with children, 67% are food insecure, including 31% who are experiencing hunger.

25% of all households served had one or more children under age 18 (32,965 children); 6% of all households served had one or more children age 5 or under (6,581 children).

visit http://www.hawaiifoodbank.org/ for more information on how you can help. its really not that hard to do and i hope other companies big and small will start their own food drive. not to mention its a lot of fun.

next year, i'm going to shoot for 2,000 pounds of food. not sure how i'm going to pull that off, but its a great goal! wanna help?