Community service
Food drive helps letter carriers give back to communities
Final preparations are underway for the 25th annual Letter Carriers’ Stamp Out Hunger® Food Drive on Saturday, May 13.
And America’s letter carriers will be ready for it, NALC President Fredric Rolando said. “Preparation and coordination for Food Drive Day can be challenging,” he said. “Despite the challenges, we look forward to it each year becauseof the important role we’re playing in thefight against hunger in this country.”
As letter carriers are keenly aware, too many of our customers live in challenging situations, uncertain of where their next meal will come.
“We deliver to every address in America at least six days a week,” Rolando said, “and because we’re such a consistent and familiar presence in neighborhoods, we’re all too familiar with the unfortunate reality of ongoing hunger.”
Over the last 24 national food drives, letter carriers have collected more than 1.5 billion pounds of food, helped by untold thousands of fellow postal employees, retired letter carriers, family members and friends. The food is then distributed to local food pantries within the same communities where it was collected. (As we celebrate the 25th anniversary of the food drive, read more about its fascinating history here.)
Joining NALC this year as national food drive partners are the U.S. Postal Service, National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association, United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, United Way Worldwide, AFL-CIO, AARP Foundation, Valpak and Valassis.
To help spread the word, the Postal Service is once again distributing special Stamp Out Hunger buttons that letter carriers and other postal employees can wear in the days leading up to the drive.
In a letter to area vice presidents, Postal Service Chief Operating Officer David Williams encouraged full support for the food drive—“by approving any appropriate local promotions (such as carriers replacing uniform shirts with the Food Drive T-shirt during the campaign, and wearing lapel buttons promoting the food drive) and assisting with the distribution of special bags as a customer convenience to collect food donations.”
Branch food drive coordinators should return the official results form to National Headquarters as soon as possible, but in all cases to arrive at NALC no later than the June 9 deadline for publication in The Postal Record.
Picture perfect: Action photos, video clips and news media items from the food drive also should be forwarded to Headquarters as soon as possible. If you’re planning to use your smartphone to take videos or photos of food drive volunteers in action, be sure to hold your phone camera horizontally (landscape) and as steady as possible.
You can upload your photos easily by dragging and dropping the files into this special Hightail “cloud” folder—no user name or password required. Once you get on the site, it’s self-explanatory. And you’ll help us out tremendously if you include a message with your photos that tells us your branch name and number as well as the name of the city where your photos were taken.
If you are interviewed by local news media in your city—TV, radio or newspaper—or if your local stations or papers run stories about the food drive beforehand or afterward, please send an e-mail to lettercarrierfooddrive@nalc.org and let us know the name of the station and the approximate time the story aired. You can also send a link to such stories to that e-mail address.
Be sure to keep in touch with the food drive’s official social media accounts—on Facebook, “like” facebook.com/StampOutHunger, and on Twitter, follow @StampOutHunger.