Letter carriers, volunteers set for Saturday’s food drive

Yellow bags help potential donors prepare for second-largest annual food drive in Clark County

By Patty Hastings, Columbian Social Services, Demographics, Faith

Published: May 11, 2017, 8:20pm

2 Photos

Letter carrier Bob Weyer delivers mail and a yellow bag for the 25th annual Letter Carriers’ Stamp Out Hunger Food Drive. He walks 10.5 miles daily delivering mail to residents in the Carter Park neighborhood and believes his customers will come through with donations for the food drive. “I’m the luckiest guy I know. All of my customers are so generous and so nice,” Weyer said. (Amanda Cowan/The Columbian) Photo Gallery

Bob Weyer has been a letter carrier for 17 years. He used to work on Vancouver’s east side and now has a walking route on the west end, covering neighborhoods like Carter Park.

“One of the reasons that I took on this walking route is I really like being part of the neighborhood,” he said.

Being part of the neighborhood means helping out your neighbors when things aren’t going so well, Weyer said.

As he delivered mail along West 37th Street on Wednesday afternoon, he stuck bright yellow grocery bags in everyone’s mailboxes: a reminder of Saturday’s Stamp out Hunger Food Drive. It’s the 25th anniversary of the National Association of Letter Carriers’ food drive, and organizer Don Young hopes it’s the biggest. His goal is 200,000 pounds of donated food — a goal the 69-year-old hopes to reach some year before he retires from heading up the food drive.

People can fill the yellow bag (or any other bags they have on hand) with nonperishable foods and put their donations by the mailbox Saturday morning. Letter carriers and volunteers will pick up the food Saturday during their normal mail delivery routes. It’s the second-largest annual drive for the Clark County Food Bank, behind Walk & Knock.

The food donated during Walk & Knock in December is pretty much all used up by now, said James Fitzgerald, food operations manager at the food bank. Food from the letter carriers’ food drive helps refill the shelves through summer, which isn’t typically a time people think about donating food.

Donations from Walk & Knock and the letter carriers’ food drive have declined in recent years. In 2010, people donated 158,000 pounds of food during the letter carriers’ food drive. Last year, 115,000 pounds were donated. Nobody’s quite pinpointed why that’s happening, Fitzgerald said. It could have to do with giving fatigue from all the other, smaller food drives that happen throughout the year, or declining news readership or changes in philanthropic habits. Fitzgerald has heard from people in the Oregon Food Bank network and some Washington partners that collections from large drives tend to be down from years past.

A postcard sent to postal customers around the country tells people to collect and bag healthy nonperishable food items for the Stamp out Hunger Food Drive. But, Fitzgerald said the food bank doesn’t want that emphasis on healthy to discourage people from donating whatever nonperishables they may be able to give.

“Healthy is great, but any food is better than no food,” he said.

Need has remained about the same. Around 13 percent of people in Clark County are considered food insecure.

Last year, the county food bank distributed food boxes to 103,771 people through its 35 partner agencies, such as pantries and shelters. While the number of people getting food boxes has leveled off, more people are attending special produce distributions and using the open tables at pantries to get bread and produce, Fitzgerald said.

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