Final Count

We swung by and picked up the "late" food from the post office yesterday, bringing this year's tally officially to 102 boxes of nonperishable food. Thanks very much, Amy Campain and the letter carriers! You rock.

Here's the site from the food drive: http://www.helpstampouthunger.com/thankyou.aspx.

United Church of Christ Seneca Valley also had some beautiful cereal yesterday; it's so much nicer to have donated cereals. When Germantown HELP buys it, we get the cheapest and most boring cereal for the buck (that isn't loaded with sugar). (Usually, generic corn flakes). The donated cereals run the gamut from Kashi to Captain Crunch, so people will get some great variety and bigger boxes, too.

Thanks to Yuen Lee, technically a Meals on Wheels volunteer, for stepping in to help fill some of the gaps in the Germantown HELP schedule this month. It's a big help!

Stamp Out Hunger

Phew! You know those white bins that the post office uses to sort and carry mail? The Letter Carriers Association's "Stamp Out Hunger" food drive was this past Saturday; our intrepid Germantown letter carriers hauled in 100 bins of food! Germantown HELP rented a truck to transport all that food to the pantry. Howard Lichtman, Steve Maselko, and Suzanne Krall and son Sean came to load the truck. Around 6:30, seven boy scouts, eleven adults and a few other helpers sorted it all and squeezed it into the pantry. It was a big effort to pull it all off in a couple hours, thank you everyone!!

I meant to take pictures, I really did, but I just forgot. There was so much going on! I'm getting pretty good at driving trucks (this one was 17 feet, much easier than December's 24-footer to pick up Toys for Tots), but I still won't back one up without constant guidance.

Saturday May 9th is Stamp Out Hunger!

Next Saturday is "Stamp Out Hunger," the annual Letter Carriers Association food collection. Some years they collect a LOT; other years, they collect even more! This year, we will rent a truck and pick it all up at once (or maybe two trips, depending on the haul). Do you have a strong back? Are you available to help, starting at about 4:45? Please let Cindy know at cindymajane@gmail.com. Thanks!

NWHS, Seneca Creek Community Church

These pictures were sent by Kara Lloyd, a Northwest High School student, of the food drive the NW Ambassadors did a couple weeks ago. Aren't they great?

Rebecca Matthews of Seneca Creek Community Church hauled in a vanload of food today... Thanks very much to SCCC for collecting it! And to Rebecca for hauling it in... Looks like there is plenty of spaghetti sauce, cereal and peanut butter, as well as all kinds of great stuff. We're stockpiling food now - a lot usually comes in from Stamp Out Hunger in May, as well - but then donations trail off over the summer and we wind up buying lot of food all summer long. We've been experiencing fairly typical demand for this time of year, so we're keeping up quite well.

"Auxiliary Food Storage Facility" open!

Thanks to Suzanne Krall's sawhorses and Tom Santucci's doors, we now have a couple sorting tables in our storage unit (or, as Howard Lichtman termed it, "The Auxiliary Food Storage Facility"). And, thanks to the Germantown Athletic Club, both the pantry and the storage unit have LOTS of food in them! Mike Ginsberg did a great job organizing the GAC coaches food drive, it was huge... We really appreciate the efforts of his whole family to organize, collect, and especially deliver all that food. Mike, we hope your back feels better soon!

We're still looking for Rubbermaid-style bins with lids, so we can store boxed items (cereal, pasta, etc.) without tempting mice. Extra Space Storage doesn't have a mouse problem and they don't want to acquire one.

What's going on, April 21, 2009

Ordinarily, there won't be this much to read, but this is the first one, so we have to catch up!

FOOD DRIVES: Thanks so much to the Germantown Athletic Club, the Northwest High School Ambassadors, Victory Christian Church, United Church of Christ Seneca Valley and Sally K. Ride Elementary School for doing some big food drives in the last month! You collected some great food, thank you so much!

STORAGE ROOM: Yesterday, we rented a 10x20 storage unit to store our overflow food. We need sawhorses and a counter (to put on the sawhorses), to set up a sorting table with storage underneath. We also need a LOT of Rubbermaid storage bins with lids, to keep boxed items in (cereal, pasta, etc.). It would be great to have some "stick up" lights, too. There's only one little bulb in there, it's a little dark.

We had to rent some space, as we can't use part of the current pantry any more and storage was getting really limited. The pantry will still be the spot volunteers pick up their deliveries, we just needed overflow storage.

DRIVERS NEEDED: We're looking for April drivers on the 24th or 25th, 27th, 29th and 30th. If you've got some time, let Cindy know!

FUNDING UPDATES: We've gotten a number of grants last quarter to help us buy food. Our clients have really been enjoying the chicken, juice and butter we've been able to add to our deliveries! Mary Baney is working on some prescriptions grants to enable us to raise the amount of our assistance to $150 per client, perhaps more if they come through Emergency Services. The bank account was very low during parts of 2008 - in fact, we had to close the prescription program for 2 months - so we're being a bit cautious this year. Summer is a slow time for donations, food and funds in the best of economies. But we're hanging on and planning for the summer now.

CURRENT FOOD NEEDS: Rice (or rice mixes), mac & cheese.

WEBSITE UPDATES: Thanks very much to Suzanne Krall, Laura Totis and Abby & Carolyn Majane, who went to Baltimore to sit in a computer lab and have their volunteer process analyzed for some new website ideas. Lisa Harper and her team from Baltimore University even had a neat machine that measures how your eyes track when you look from one thing to the next onscreen. Hopefully, a new website and database will emerge from it all. We appreciate your patience, phew.

New Blog!

Hi, friends and volunteers!

We've started this blog to keep volunteers, donors and anyone else who might be interested up-to-date on the status of Germantown, HELP. Positions we need help with, financials, all that! So please subscribe to our feed, or bookmark us and check back now and then.

Thanks!