Doc, what are the top five items food banks LOVE to receive? I'm doing a collection soon and want to ask for specifics.
MONEY. WE WANT MONEY. MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY. WE CAN DO SO MUCH WITH IT. WE HAVE ACCESS TO DEALS YOU COULD NEVER. MONEY
That aside.
I’m only going to talk about food items but if your food bank takes personal items, a lot of times diapers, feminine hygiene products, etc, are very very welcome.
1) Canned chicken and beef
looooooove this stuff. It’s expensive, it lasts forever, it tastes good and it can be used a variety of ways. This stuff is fucking catnip to food banks, it’s so hard for us to provide proteins.
2) Fancy nut butters
Peanut butter is a standby for food banks as a shelf-stable inexpensive protein, but if we have a family with a kid with a peanut allergy that’s not going to work. Non-peanut butters are expensive and it’s something we hardly ever see donated. (we also like peanut butter, but that’s easier for us to buy ourselves than non-peanut butters)
3) Canned or packaged tuna
You may notice a trend here in shelf-stable proteins. And yeah. That’s basically it, so I’m not going to keep harping on it. But this stuff is a godsend.
4) Easy breakfast things for kids (Granola bars, instant oatmeal, and the like)
Whatever Donald Trump tells you, most people who get food from food banks are actually working their asses off and so they have to leave Obama to raise their baby or whatever, and they don’t have a lot of time in the morning. Things like this that kids can make for themselves are expensive. (Another trend you may be noticing–donate shit that costs a lot of money. That helps us more than all the shitty green bean cans in the world) But they are so helpful for busy working families where the parents may not have a set schedule and sometimes little Amanda is making her own breakfast before she runs off to school. Don’t let kids go to school hungry.
5) Shelf-stable juice
This is one people never think of! But if you show up with a bunch of (preferably reduced sugar stuff) bottles of juice at my door, oh man, you are gonna get so many check mark and okay hand emoticons. This stuff is great for kids, and it doesn’t require refrigeration until it’s opened, so it works great for food drives.
But seriously, give money
And it’s way better food, too, anything you get prepackaged has A TON of sugar and/or salt in it…collecting cans may be more exciting than writing a check, but if the point is to help people, the check is going to get a lot more done
Yoooooo heads up for those of you with kids, I know this time of year schools start holding canned food drives so keep this in mind if you’re able to give.
collecting cans may be more exciting than writing a check, but if the point is to help people, the check is going to get a lot more done .
hint: the point should be to help people.
Also, please consider setting this as a scheduled post for June/July. A lot of food insecure families with children rely on school lunch to make ends meet, and that’s obviously not an option during summer vacation. Lots of people give during November and December, but summer is a lean time for food banks. Which is a shame, cuz fresh produce is at a boom during that time of year, so not only would summer donations boost how many people the food banks can help, it would boost the quality of the help they provide.
If you want to do a cash drive but also exploit the dopamine hit people get from dropping their can of garbanzo beans into the box, my middle school did something that was SHOCKINGLY effective:
A penny drive.
(DuckDuckGo tells me a penny in 1999 would be worth two cents in 2023, but given how much food prices have gone up, I’d make this a dime drive in the modern day.)
Here’s how it works.
Every classroom got a gallon water jug. You brought in your pennies from home and put them in the jug. Every penny equaled one point, and at the end of a set time period, the classroom with the most points won a pizza party. All the funds were then donated.
BUT.
You will notice I didn’t say the class with the most pennies. I said the class with the most POINTS.
And that is because you could sabotage other classrooms by putting other denominations in their jugs. The number of pennies equal to the cent amount of those denominations would then be deducted from the penny total (so for example a nickel would lose you five points). I saw one kid absolutely TANK some of the eighth-graders by dropping a five-dollar bill in their jug, which they then had to make up in pennies before they could make any further progress.
(If you’re wondering who rolled all those pennies: it was me. Literally it was me, I volunteered because I’m an autistic weirdo who thinks counting change is fun and it got me out of class. The office ladies helped too.)
To modify this for adults, consider having it be one work shift versus another. Or there are multiple jars split between options for a vote and you get to vote by putting your change in a jar. And you MUST include the sabotage—for one it makes it more like a game, which humans love. And for another, if you’re asking for quarter donations but someone really wants to tank another group, they’re gonna whip out a twenty dollar bill. It generates higher donations because people want to win by nature.
You can ABSOLUTELY make cash drives sexy. You’ve just got to know how.
