The Bountiful Community Food Pantry was packed Tuesday evening as cars, trucks, and vans lined up to drop off turkeys, canned goods, and Thanksgiving sides. Dozens of volunteers worked nonstop to unload entire truckloads of food, weigh donations, and count turkeys as they came in.
Director of Operations Rachelle Jones oversaw the flurry of activity, coordinating volunteers in the receiving bay and making sure everything ran smoothly. “It’s that we have the kind of community that will do this,” she said.
This is the fourth year of the turkey drive, and also the second year the entire county will be involved. Donations had already been pouring in for days. The loading bay was covered in boxes of donated food. At the back of the pantry was a freezer normally used for everyday items, but it had been cleared out to make room for the turkeys. And they were being packed to the ceiling.
The day before the drive, Executive Director Rebekah Anderson told me the Food Pantry was getting so many donations that it was hard to keep up. But they were doing their best. Because all the donations they bring in, turkeys, side dishes, and the money, will be spread out all over the county. The donations will go to other food pantries, churches, and even schools to help families in need have a good Thanksgiving.
And why is that so important?
“Imagine having like a teenager and they go back to school on Monday after Thanksgiving,” Anderson said,” and everybody’s talking about what they did and this person says “Oh, we didn’t do Thanksgiving. We just had boxed mac and cheese.’ That can be hard. So having that event that’s so important in America, that everybody else is doing, is really important for a family who’s in financial crisis.”
I had to leave at 7:45, a few minutes before the drive ended. But by then more than 3000 pounds of food and 350 turkeys had been donated. According to Jones, you can calculate out that about 1.9 pounds of food equals a meal for a person. At that rate, these donations will be able to feed more than 1500 people this Thanksgiving.
The pantry will spend the next few weeks before Thanksgiving organizing and distributing the donations to where they need to go.
We will get follow up with the pantry to get the official number of how much food they collected.
