Whoops! That's a lot of bowties!

Number of Folks: 2 + Lots of folks from the home school group
Accomplished: 300 dental kits, over 1500 lbs of pasta packaged!
Idaho Hunger Fact of the Week: The food bank partners with 52 agencies in South East Idaho.  (i.e. distributes the food they get to this agencies who in turn distribute it to families and  others in need.)

Although only 2 folks showed up from our small group today, there was plenty of workers. Many different groups help out at the food bank and today,  a large group of kids and adults  from the Christian Home School Association showed up.  They come once a quarter to help out at the food bank.  At least one of the  families attends Grace. What an interesting and enthusiastic bunch!  We worked on 3 different projects: bread, dental kits and bow tie pasta.

Dental Kits
A group of kids was put on the dental kits which were packed assembly line style:  2 large tooth brushes, a tube of tooth paste and three small tooth brushes in  a small sack.  The items were donated by a local dental group. The kits will go into back packs distributed by the "Back Pack Program".

The kids did a great job assembling the dental kits.

     

Finished kits.

Bow Tie Pasta

Heinz recently donated 25,000 lbs of  bowtie pasta to the food bank that had been mistakenly frozen. They were afraid the pasta would not fare well in the manufacturing process. Their "mistake" was a bonanza for the food bank. The pasta came in 25 pound cartons that needed to be broken down into 1 pound packages for distribution to the partner agencies.   We labeled bags, scooped pasta into them, tied them off and re-packed them into their original cartons.  We managed to re-package over 1500 lbs in the two hours we were there!  But there's still a lot of pasta to re-package!

I love this picture of the kids labeling bags! It shows that even the youngest kids can help!

25 pounds of loose bowtie pasta..

Scooping the pasta into bags.

One pound bags.

1145 pounds of pasta ready to distribute to the food pantries through out Eastern IDaho!

Spaghetti

Number of Folks: 3
Accomplished: packaged 312 1 pound packages of spaghetti
Idaho Hunger Fact of the Week: Only 36% of the Idaho food bank recipients also get food stamp.

Every year, in conjunction with Feeding the 5000 Families Campaign,  the LDS cannery in  Idaho falls donates the output of their facility for an evening to the Idaho Food Bank. The only caveat:we have to provide the volunteers.  This year we canned 172 cases of spaghetti sauce and the Cannery donated and delivered to the food bank a d additional 128 cases each of vegetable, tomato and chicken noodle soup and 75 cases  of bulk spaghetti.

Our project today was re-packaging the spaghetti into one pound packages.  W got thru 13 cases.

Each case contains 3 8 lb packages of spaghetti. We labeled bags, put in about 1 lb of spaghetti, sealed the bag and put it back into the box. 



Here's a picture of the volunteers working in the cannery making spaghetti sauce.

Bulk spaghetti delivered from Cannery,

3 of these 8 lb packages  are in each box.

Packaging the spaghetti...into 1 lb containers.








The 13 repacked cases.