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Nov 2009  |  By Mibs  |  Comments (0)

Follow Make It Better's Example and Get Involved with the Greater Chicago Food Depository This Thanksgiving

TAGS: Thanksgiving, food pantry, hunger, community service

Make It Better participated in the Fall Family Repack Saturday, Nov. 7, from 9:30-12 and it was an incredibly rewarding experience for all the families involved.

170 adults and children attended including 9 MIB's and their children at the Greater Chicago Food Depository. It was a wonderful event for your kids especially. Groups were broken up into 5 separate tasks.

One group packed boxes for seniors who live in low-income housing. The box contained rice, pasta, green beans, corn, tuna, peanut butter and other essentials. This box must last them a month.

The food depository warehouse is an amazing facility and the largest of its kind in the U.S. Very powerful to see all the food that comes into the warehouse from all over the Chicagoland area.

The Thanksgiving Challenge

There's no better time get help the Greater Chicago Food Depository than this Thanksgiving. There is a very direct way to help, which will support Thanksgiving distribution, called the $500,000 Thanksgiving Challenge.

The exciting part of this challenge is that we have two very generous donors that have donated matching gifts to the Thanksgiving Challenge.

One foundation will match gifts received for Thanksgiving of $1,000 or more. The other, Allstate Financial, will match gifts of $10,000 or more. Any and all community support is appreciated—from a can of food, to a dollar donation, to an hour of volunteer time. Visit our Web site for more information.

To get a sense of the Greater Chicago Food Depository's impact, the following stats were provided by Shannon Stubblefield.

Chicago Food Depository by the Numbers

Pantry Stats: Demand at pantries hit an all time high in September - 427,660 visits. This narrowly topped July, which held the previous 'record' (for lack of a better word) at 426,898 visits.

To put it in perspective these first three months of the fiscal year (July, Aug, Sept) are 26% higher than last year and an overwhelming 70% ahead of two years ago.

As for Saturday numbers, here are our totals:
176 Volunteers (I was generalizing at 170!)

Cereal Repack: 36 volunteers
546 Pounds Processed

Nourish for Knowledge Bags/Boxes:
50 volunteers
1380 Bags
69 Boxes

Ingredients for Independence boxes (older adult program):
33 volunteers
480 Boxes

Single Food Box: 57 volunteers
621 Boxes

Distribution: So far this year, we are distributing more food than ever - we are 2,008,236 ahead of last year's distribution as of Friday 11/6/09. Between now and the end of the year, we will distribute the following food for Thanksgiving meals, in addition to our "standard" food distribution:
-241,920 pounds of turkey
-67,500 pounds of yams
-43,200 pounds of ham
-36,960 pounds of cranberry sauce
-33,516 pounds of corn
-19,440 pounds of stuffing
-18,000 pounds of chicken
-4,375 pounds of gravy
-15,600 pounds of potatoes