Non-political PSA time

The company that I work for (to remain nameless, though some perceptive readers may figure it out) is a pretty good company, though like most corporations it's a long way from perfect.

One of the big imperfections is the amount of money their PAC has given a certain blustery, soon-to-be-UNelected official from CD5 over the years (>$14K).

However, every so often, they do something really cool.

It's called Community Day. It's a day where our local facility shuts down operations for a day and every employee goes out into the community for one day to work on projects for charitable groups.

Last Friday was one of those days.

The project that I volunteered for was at the St. Mary's/Westside Food Bank Main Office and Warehouse in Phoenix. There were about 70 or so of us there to help them put together emergency food boxes.

St. Mary's Food Bank became the world's first food bank when it was founded in 1967 by John van Hengel; Westside Food Bank opened its doors in 1973. The two organizations merged in 2005 in order to better serve the community.

The organization has a small professional staff but relies on volunteers for most of the work of collecting, sorting, packing, and distributing food. Last year, volunteers donated over 300,000 hours of their time in order to distribute the equivalent of over 200,000 meals per day. 300,000 hours is the equivalent to 150 full time employees. Those volunteer hours allowed the food bank to save approximately $4,000,000 in salary and benefits, money that could then be spent directly on those who most needed it. More info about the organization is here.

Anyway, when we all finally arrived, we assembled in their new Volunteer Center (so new that we were the first group to use it!), a room with seating for large groups as well as other facilities (i.e. - refrigerator, coffee machines) so that the room can be used as a meeting or training room.

From there, we were divided up into smaller teams and assigned to our areas. My group was assigned the task of running an assembly line that packed some emergency food boxes, sealed the boxes, and stacked the boxes on pallets.

Weeks before, those of us who volunteered for this project had been warned by past volunteers here to bring gloves. Most people brought latex gloves from work.

As I was the only one of use who brought thick work gloves, the job of wrangling pallets was given to me. Evidently, latex gloves do a lousy job of stopping splinters and nails. Who'da thunk?? :)

For a few hours, we worked our asses off, and many of us were a little sore afterward. However, most of us could go home, grab a bite to eat, and rest up. The people that benefit from the food bank usually don't have that option.

Anyway, in total, our volunteer group packed approximately 1500 boxes of food.

In addition to volunteers, the food bank desperately needs donations. I know that most of the people who read this blog have donated to or volunteered for one or more political campaigns, and that money was already tight to begin with for most of us. However, the election is over in a week, but people in need will still be here.

Give what you can.

Back to politics tomorrow!!

Good night everybody...