FOOD PANTRY UPDATE: Food Pantry grateful for community support

The volunteer staff at the Creswell Food Pantry would like to thank the entire Creswell community for the incredible outpouring of support these past two months.
It all started with a Creswell Food Pantry Facebook post, announcing that our shelves were nearly depleted of canned meals, fruits and vegetables. Facebook invited us to add a donation button at no charge to us, which received $650 in all. It will be mailed to us soon and we will use it to purchase canned fruit and ravioli with meatballs. We “boosted” that post for five days and it was viewed by 5,148 people, shared by 66!
Nelson Restaurant Corporation made a significant donation and we purchased 1,512 cans of corn, chili, and green beans — doubly benefiting because of a fantastic sale at our local Bi-mart store. Jessica Landstra saw the post and quickly joined in to help by starting a food drive at Farmlands Market. She posted the information and a photo of the food barrel on Farmland’s Facebook page, in a business ad and an article in The Creswell Chronicle!
In all, Farmlands collected 200 pounds of canned foods over the following two weeks. Jessica has invited us to keep the food barrel at Farmlands for continued donations.
Adrien Waye, a Lularoe business owner also jumped in to start a food drive in addition to donating $5 for every sale over a week’s time. She collected 60 pounds of food and donated $260! Adrien also contacted Lularoe corporate and facilitated a donation of $105. Those funds will be used to purchase canned foods.
Additionally, Adrien shared our story with Ashley Lewis of Bean Hopper, who also started a food drive. For a full week, Bean Hopper discounted every cup of coffee by $.50, for customers who donated food during their food drive. They collected 130 pounds!
The Creswell Church of the Nazarene also carried out a food drive within their church over several weeks, bringing in 292 pounds of canned food to our Food Pantry recently. The food barrel donations at the Creswell Library and Creswell Bi-mart have increased significantly throughout these weeks.
An anonymous donor also stopped in recently and purchased $500 worth of canned food for the Food Pantry.
We are very excited to share that our canned food supply is much more stable now. Several food drives will be coming up in November and December-we will continue to need those donations as well. The fall food drives help to carry us through the fall and winter.
We are currently providing food assistance to an average of 169 low-income families each month. Our small community has really been outstanding in their enthusiasm to bring our food supply back up.
Those efforts will truly make a difference for the hungry families that walk through our doors.