This year’s Stamp Out Hunger food drive is Saturday, May 14, but some USPS employees have already started collecting donations.
“One can, one box, one bag can help,” Mid-America District Manager Gail Hendrix told employees this week at a kickoff rally in Kansas City, MO, where more than 1,000 cans of soup were donated.
USPS and the National Association of Letter Carriers sponsor Stamp Out Hunger, an annual one-day drive that allows customers to fill a bag with nonperishable food items and leave it by their mailboxes for carriers to pick up. The donations are then distributed to food banks and pantries.
Last year’s drive collected 71 million pounds of food that fed an estimated 30 million people.
In Florence, AL, employees hope to set a local record by collecting more than 100,000 pounds of food.
“The more food we collect, the more hungry people we feed,” Florence Letter Carrier Steven McCrary told TimesDaily.com.
The drive is critical since food donations usually decline during the summer, Rick Gaupo, president of an Oregon food bank, told the Woodburn Independent.
“[It’s] one of the most important food drives of the year,” he said.
The Stamp Out Hunger site has more information.
