Hundreds of Mormon families and missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints recently collected food for the ninth annual Winnipeg Harvest Food Drive.
Previous to the food drive, members of the Church placed 60,000 flyers in mailboxes around the city. The flyers invited residents to leave food donations by their front doors to be picked up. The bags of food were collected and taken to local churches for sorting and then loaded onto trucks to be delivered to Winnipeg Harvest, the city’s largest food bank.
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Winnipeg Harvest is a non-profit community-based organization that distributes food to more than 340 agencies. Many individual, business, community and faith groups contribute to this success. The organization moved more than 12 million pounds of food through its warehouse last year.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was a major contributor to this effort via the summer food drive which comes at a very important time, when shelves and food supplies are at their lowest. The Church delivered a semi-truck full of canned food from a bishops’ storehouse located in Alberta. Bishops’ storehouses are places where grains and other commodities donated by members as free-will offerings are stored and distributed to help the needy. The truck sent to the Winnipeg Harvest contained over 25,000 pounds of food, including cases of apricots, beef stew, chili, corn, green beans, peaches, pears, peas and tuna equalling over $28,000 in canned goods.
Organizer Wayne Drozdowski said, “Over the years, members of the Church with volunteers from the community have joined together and created a legacy of compassion in their service to Winnipeg Harvest and the community. … Great things are brought about and burdens are lightened through the efforts of many hands anxiously engaged in a good cause.”
Peak of the Market and Safeway stores matched pound for pound the food that was collected, giving this year a grand total of 109,236 pounds of food donated to Winnipeg Harvest. Trucks were generously donated by Canada Cartage and Arnold Brothers.
Drozdowski added, “As we serve together and reach out to those in need, we can truly say we follow the admonition of the Saviour when He said, ‘Feed my sheep.’”