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How to Hold a Food Drive for Northwest Harvest in 10 Easy Steps
1. Decide whether to hold your own drive or participate in a local food drive or event. Check our calendar for ideas.
2. Decide when you’d like to hold your drive. Although the holidays are a popular time of year, food is needed year-round. You might consider holding a drive in the spring or summer when supply is especially low. Hosting a themed food drive, such as a collection to benefit kids during the summer months, is a great idea.
3. Decide how long to hold your food drive. Will it be one day, a week, a month? Or perhaps this is an ongoing effort? It’s entirely up to you.
4. Do you want to collect food, money or both? Northwest Harvest can feed a family of three one nutritious meal for 67 cents, and we have money collection boxes available for your use. We can also issue food collection boxes if you’re hosting a drive.
5. Do you need posters? We can deliver them with boxes in many cases or you can download them yourself. You can also download our list of preferred foods by clicking here.
6. Fill out a food drive application form and submit it. Our food drive coordinator Heather Millward will contact you to arrange details.
7. Host your food drive and give it plenty of support.
• Email your co-workers, friends and neighbors to rally support.
• Make good use of Northwest Harvest posters and choose central locations for your food collection boxes.
• Set a goal and monitor the progress.
• Hold a contest between departments, classes, troops, etc. to see who can raise the most. Offer incentives for those who contribute the most to your drive.
8. If you’ve arranged to have our warehouse pick up your collection, give our dispatcher, Tom Breyer, a call at 206.923.7446 when you’re nearing the finish of your drive. Note that we may need several days’ lead time in order to pick up your donation.
9. If you’re dropping the food off to our Cherry Street Food Bank or our Kent warehouse, you deserve extra thanks! You’ve saved us additional expenses that we can redirect towards serving our clients.
10. Pat yourself on the back for a job well done. How many meals did you serve to those in need? We estimate that 1.3 pounds of food or 22 cents serves one person one meal. Do the math and share your success with your participants!
Northwest Harvest strives to make the most of our limited resources. Our costs are rising due to the higher price of food and fuel and in order to be good stewards of our resources, we must limit the number of trips our trucks make each day. We ask that you do all you can to stretch your donation farther by keeping the following things in mind:
• Northwest Harvest can drop off food collection boxes and pick up your donation. We ask that the boxes be full or close to full at the time of pick-up to allow us to be as efficient as possible. Each box is roughly the size of an office desk chair and it takes about 85 cans or boxes of food to fill one box.
• Northwest Harvest cannot pick up at private residences.
• In most cases, we can only pick up in the greater Seattle area. However, exceptions do occur and we ask that you contact our dispatcher, Tom Breyer, at 206.923.7446 to see if we might be able to help.
• We ask that you make the most of our drop-off sites or consider participating in one of our ongoing events in the greater Seattle area if you have collected a smaller amount of food.
• Please note that October through December, our volume is especially high and it may take some time for us to approve food drive applications or answer questions. We appreciate your patience. We encourage you to plan your food drive as far ahead as possible to avoid delays.
Where will your food go? After the food arrives at our Kent warehouse, it is sorted by volunteers and packaged for distribution to our network of nearly 300 food banks and meal programs throughout the state.
Still have questions? Please contact food drive coordinator Heather Millward at 206.923.7421.
On behalf of our neighbors in need, thank you for supporting Northwest Harvest!
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