Full Hearts and Plates for the Holidays

This past holiday season brought many chances to help those in our four-county region get food they needed to bring their families together around the table. For the second year in a row, we conducted the largest distributions of the year just before Thanksgiving. To improve the experience for our community members, we scheduled three separate events, one each in Crawford, Huron, and Lorain counties. We also required pre-registration. Our goal was to shorten the distance needed to travel to a distribution and shorten the wait time in line. For the Lorain County distribution, we partnered with Lorain County Community College and moved the distribution to their campus off of Abbe Road in Elyria.

Second Harvest served 3,000 families at these holiday distributions and gave out over 210,000 pounds of food. Each qualified family received approximately 70 pounds of food, groceries, produce, and staples. We are certain that plenty of smiles, well-wishes, and hope found their way into the homes and hearts of the community too.

We believe that these changes proved to accomplish our goal of improving the quality of the experience for those attending the distributions. A few comments from community members included Christine who said, “I am here and want to say thank you to everyone for helping my family this year.” Ginger added, “Just wanted to thank everyone involved this morning. I was amazed at how organized and efficient the whole thing was ... everyone was so friendly. Thank you! Our family is beyond grateful!” Karen shared, “Thank you so much … You are a blessing to all you serve.” Finally, one of our volunteers reached out to comment about her experience working the distribution, “Great organized event! Loved working it!”