o What: Clark County’s biggest, all-volunteer, single-day food drive
o When: 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday
o Where: Throughout the county. Put donations out at your doorstep by 9 a.m.
o Donations: Nonperishable items such as canned meats and fish, canned or boxed meals (soup, chili, macaroni and cheese), canned or dried beans and peas, pasta, cereals, rice, canned fruits and juices, canned vegetables, baking mixes and cooking oils.
o Volunteering and information: Call 877-995-6625 or go to www.walkandknock.org.
o To donate money: Send a check made payable to Inter-Service Walk and Knock, P.O. Box 353, Vancouver, WA 98666.
You can help feed thousands of hungry Clark County citizens, and participate in what’s become a great local tradition, by filling a bag with nonperishable food and leaving it at your doorstep on Saturday.
o What: Clark County's biggest, all-volunteer, single-day food drive
o When: 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday
o Where: Throughout the county. Put donations out at your doorstep by 9 a.m.
o Donations: Nonperishable items such as canned meats and fish, canned or boxed meals (soup, chili, macaroni and cheese), canned or dried beans and peas, pasta, cereals, rice, canned fruits and juices, canned vegetables, baking mixes and cooking oils.
o Volunteering and information: Call 877-995-6625 or go to www.walkandknock.org.
o To donate money: Send a check made payable to Inter-Service Walk and Knock, P.O. Box 353, Vancouver, WA 98666.
The 26th annual Inter-Service Walk & Knock is the county’s biggest single-day food drive, and it’s based entirely on volunteer labor and donations.
Beginning at 9 a.m. Saturday, volunteers will scour the landscape for donations left in bags and boxes on porches, doorsteps, stoops and driveways. (Bags were inserted into editions of The Columbian on Wednesday).
The donations will be taken back to one of several locations for boxing and packing into trucks. The trucks will take the food to a warehouse lent for a week by the Port of Vancouver; there, the food will be weighed and divided for pickup by local food pantries.
Last year’s event broke all records by collecting 162 tons of food and $50,000 in cash donations.
If you, and thousands like you, are more aware of Walk & Knock this year than ever before — and if the whole project brings in a heavier-that-ever haul of local largesse as a result — it may be thanks to John Cummings.
Cummings, 16, decided to target Walk & Knock for his Eagle Scout project this year. But he’s been pitching in with Walk & Knock as a Boy Scout long enough to know the volunteer machinery works pretty well. It took him a while to figure out a way the whole thing could be improved.
Publicity is what he hit upon. The best way to crank up food donations, he figured, is by spreading the word as never before. He knew the Walk & Knock organization only had about 100 small yard signs.
He decided to shoot for 1,000 durable, weather-resistant signs. He pounded the pavement over the course of this year to raise $1,500, and he won a matching grant from the Vancouver Rotary Foundation. So, $3,000 was enough to pay for his 1,000 signs — plus stakes. The signs went up at major intersections all over Clark County last weekend, with labor donated by Cummings’ Boy Scout Troop 358, the Laurelwood Baptist Church and several local service clubs, including the Lions and the Rotary.
“It was kind of awkward showing up in my Boy Scout uniform asking these businesses for money,” said Cummings, who attends Mountain View High School. “But I guess it worked out.”
Without Bud
This is the first Walk & Knock to go forward without the presence of its key founder, A.C. “Bud” Pasmore, who died in October of natural causes at 90.
Last year, Pasmore told The Columbian that the early 1980s didn’t feel much different than these times. A severe economic downturn had led to layoffs, foreclosures, homelessness and widespread hunger.
Pasmore was aware of many food-collection drives and stations — barrels at banks, boxes at schools. But he figured more food would get collected if the collectors came to the donors rather than waiting for donors to make their own special effort. Initial attempts to publicize the idea and then scour the streets with Lions Club volunteers and vehicles over many days showed he was right, and promised even greater success with a bit more organization and focus.
So he and his Lions Club buddy Doug Rae pulled together a number of service clubs and civic organizations — everyone from the Kiwanis and Rotary clubs to staffers at Clark County and the city of Vancouver. Thousands of volunteers were mobilized and hundreds of thousands of pounds of food were collected — and a community tradition was born.
“It just grew phenomenally,” Pasmore told The Columbian last year. “It just boggles your mind, it’s grown far beyond anything we ever expected.”
Walk & Knock remains driven entirely by volunteers from service clubs like the Lions, Kiwanis, Optimist, Rotary, and the Clark County Amateur Radio Club (which helps coordinate all the volunteers and vehicles).
According to its website, Walk & Knock has collected nearly 5.7 million pounds of food over 25 years, valued at just more than $7.4 million.
Last year, Pasmore’s daughter, Mary Bailey, told The Columbian about her father: “He always saw the glass as half full, never half empty. He always figured he could make it happen, rather than looking at reasons why it couldn’t happen.”
