Alex's Community Food Drive

For Alex's Eagle Project, he planned and carried out a community food drive.  He wanted to donate to the Loaves and Fishes Food Bank/Soup Kitchen here in Clarksville which provides meals for the homeless.  It was a lot of work for him.  He went around to local businesses to get donations of bags, copies, and food.  There were several stores who donated bags, and a local copy business (Copies in a Flash) that donated 500 copies.  He went to numerous stores for donations (and I didn't go with him, except to drive him there) and had to make many phone calls.  It was definitely out of his comfort zone at first.  But, by the end, he was confident and he did all the organizing nearly 100% by himself.  I was very proud of him.

 He did the project over two Saturdays (July 16th and 23rd).  The first Saturday, he organized teams to go out to twelve neighborhoods and knock on each door and leave bags with a note attached about the food drive.  It was pretty hot and humid, but less hot than it had been previous days.  The second Saturday, we collected food from those same neighborhoods.  It was an all-day event for our family both days.  Everyone helped including Jarem and Tessa.  It was refreshing in a way to be out as a family participating in a good cause.

It took Alex many hours to cut the slips of paper and staple them on each bag. 

We did help him some, but he did a lot of the work himself.  We have about 1500 total bags.

Here are the stacks of 100 bags each that covered our kitchen

This is an awful picture of me just out of the shower, counting out bags

Alex organizing the teams

As is life, things don't always go as planned.  Alex had all his teams organized in advance and everything in perfect order in advance.  However, when he got there, some people didn't show up, and there were other things that had to be accounted for (certain people couldn't do a lot of walking or wanted to be on a team together, etc).  Here he is struggling to rearrange teams to accomodate people available and everyone's needs.  This was a very good lesson for him on management and leadership.

The morning of the project, Alex had to go to soccer practice at 7:30-9am and his project started at ten.  A great friend from our ward called Eric and offered to take 225 bags for his neighborhood and do it on his own since he wouldn't be able to make it.  Of course, we wanted this, but it put us short bags for the project, so Eric called Kroger and scrambled to find more bags while Alex was at soccer.  He was able to round up some.  The above and below pictures are Eric and the missionaries stapling the slips of paper on the new bags that morning.

Some of the group that helped on the first day

Alex still contemplating how to rearrange teams

Part of our group: each group got a cooler full of water bottles (which was very helpful with the heat)

This is on the second day after the collection was done.  These are 2 of Alex's best friends (Derek and Jared)

Some of the proceeds

Close-up

Close-up of the trailer

The second truck full

There was a lot of food collected even though it is hard to tell with the bags

Jesikah tallying the food

Tally sheets

Here are two of the administrators of the Loaves and Fishes Food Bank along with some of the food Alex collected

The lady on the left is the one that Alex worked with directly.  His donations overwhelmed the soup kitchen and after filling up their pantry, they had to take much of the food to their warehouse.  He collected about 3,000 food items which total worth was around $5000-$6000 worth of food collected.  He felt very good about all that he had accomplished and Eric and I were both very proud of how he stepped up and did it.