On May 14, the United States Postal Service held its 30th annual Stamp Out Hunger Food Drive in conjunction with Good Samaritan Ministries.
The GSM warehouse received 8,561 pounds of food which marks the largest collection since prior to the pandemic, according to Good Samaritan Ministries Executive Director Leesa Stephens.
The food drive asks residents to leave a donation of non-perishable food items next to their mailbox before mail delivery.
“For us it was a very unexpected blessing,” Stephens said. “In the past the proceeds from this food drive have benefited the St. John’s Episcopal food pantry, but they are in the midst of a renovation of their facility. We did not know until about two weeks before the event that St. John’s was going to bequeath that to us this year. They were very gracious so that the food drive could go on to share that with us and we were thrilled.”
The food donated filled up 11 pallets in the GSM warehouse.
“The variety has been really good, a wide variety,” Stephens said. “Here we are 10 days later and we’ve sorted about 90 percent of it. I want to give a shout out to our staff because these guys jumped in. You start thinking about trying to sort 8,500 pounds of food and that’s a chore.”
Stephens further described the task preparing the donations for eventual distribution.
“For the first two or three days it was like Christmas,” Stephens said. “It was really exciting to go through the bags and see what kind of items had come in through the food drive. But just like a kid at Christmas, eventually the new wears off and then we settled into the hard work of being sure that every item we kept was in date and that we could use in our food pantry.”
Stephens continued, “Items are sorted according to date, and there’s a big difference between ‘best by’ and ‘use by’ and we want to make sure the items we keep are all within the ‘use by’ date. For ‘best by,’ we use U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines.”
GSM expressed their thanks to the postal workers and St. John’s Episcopal Church for the chance to participate this year, and would welcome future involvement as well.
“We are extremely grateful to St. John’s for allowing us to pair with the post office, and very grateful to the postal workers,” Stephens said. “That was the weekend it was over 105 degrees and after they had already done their route, they had their vehicles loaded and came here. That’s an incredible extra responsibility for them so we’re very thankful and they were great to work with. In the future, I know that St. John’s will be interested in this again but we would love the opportunity to partner to the postal service again in the future.”
