Annual food drive seeks cash instead of food during pandemic

Organizers of the Better Together Food Drive are asking residents to give money this year since the pandemic is preventing volunteers from collecting and packing food items.

This is the 15th year for the food drive and would have occurred on Oct. 31 as it has since 2006. Groups of volunteers would have gone from house to house picking up bags and boxes of food and then delivering them to the Moose Jaw Exhibition Grounds for sorting and eventual delivery.

However, the pandemic has played a cruel Halloween joke on event organizers at Hillcrest Apostolic Church and forced them to make alternate arrangements.

Several months ago, the church spoke with the Moose Jaw & District Food Bank and realized it was a bad idea to send volunteers to hundreds of homes during this time, explained spokesperson Karen MacNaughton. Furthermore, the food bank needs a new, larger home, so it didn’t think it could accommodate the more than 50,000 pounds of food items the event normally brings in.

“So we decided that a contact-free edition of the Better Together Food Drive would best this year,” she said.

This change is beneficial for Hillcrest Apostolic Church since it has other initiatives happening, making organizing the food drive more difficult than normal, continued MacNaughton. The restrictions that the Saskatchewan Health Authority has put in place would have also prevented the hundreds of volunteers from gathering.

Based on these limitations, event organizers encourage residents to donate financially to the food bank, either online at www.mjfoodbank.org or by mailing a cheque to its location at 305 Fairford Street West. While residents can donate to the food bank all year long, the Better Together Food Drive’s focus will be from Oct. 25 to 31; 100 per cent of all donations will go toward purchasing food.

MacNaughton has helped organize the food drive since 2007 and said she is always amazed by the volunteers’ efforts and ability to collect food on one night.

“So yes, we will be missing out on the thrill of the way we normally do food drives,” she said, “and just being able to see — you get all that food in one spot — to be able to see it is always so amazing. So we won’t have that this year, but we are watching on the food bank website to see where donations are getting to … we’re hoping to watch it climb and climb over the next two weeks.”

Since residents won’t receive brown bags for the food drive, volunteers will conduct a door-to-door blitz by dropping off orange and blue cards with information about the financial food drive.

MacNaughton said most people have understood that the food drive won’t happen in person and is moving online. They realize the organizers face restrictions on what can and can’t happen. MacNaughton believes residents will be just as generous in donating financially as they were with giving food.

Normally the food drive collects more than 50,000 pounds of food, which equals about $120,000. MacNaughton pointed out they are not looking to collect that much money, but instead, will seek to raise $50,000. She encouraged everyone to give generously and support the food bank.