Thank you Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods
Curt and I and almost 20 other Respecting Our Elders volunteers had an awesome time sharing in the pick up and delivery of more than three van loads of food by the time we got home around 10PM last night. We started at Trader Joe’s San Rafael where we picked up a few boxes of food, and went on to Trader Joe’s Larkspur where we lost count of how many shopping carts full of food we sorted through, distributed among us and still had a full pick up truck and our van packed to the brim when we went to Sausalito to take care of over 50 people living on boats, mostly “anchor-outs”.
We sent our new friend Melvin home to his low-income complex in Marin City with several bags and boxes of food, packed up the surplus into our van and went on to Whole Foods in Mill Valley where we were greeted with several more of our volunteers, sorted out the huge donation from that store that included at least a dozen of those boxes of Christmas dinner fixings (all that was needed was the main course). We filled the van to the brim, and headed out into the night to find homes for all this food.
We tried to leave some bread at Rotary Valley Senior Village (we had heard that morning that the residents weren’t seeing a lot of bread in their regular Saturday night delivery) but there was a private party going on in the community room. We moved on to our friends in Bel Marin Keys who take care of about a dozen friends who are in need of extra food or who in turn take care of other folks.
They took everything off of our hands except for about a half a van load of bread. We headed home to the Villas at Hamilton and found another party in progress hosted by our friend and neighbor, Marcia. We packed her Dad’s car with bread to take home to his neighbors in West Oakland, and then another of our neighbors came by and packed her car with bread to take to her church’s homeless feeding program on Christmas morning.
It was definitely an interesting challenge to find homes for all that food, and it made for an amazing Christmas eve, giving us the opportunity to give and give and give, all evening long. What a way to spend Christmas eve!
We so appreciate the teams at each of these stores who made it possible for us to be so generous last night. Thank You!
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