Volunteers and organizers of The Bread of Life Food Pantry at The Well at Sunnyside extended a thanks to the community for helping them collect food during the first Black Vs Blue Food Drive.
In a letter to the Record-Herald, organizers wrote, “Thank you so much for all your help promoting this year’s Black Vs Blue Food Drive. Your generosity and help allowed The Bread of Life Food Pantry to collect 3,400 pounds of food. This is simply an amazing task that came together in a couple of weeks. The total amount we collected for the very first time we tried this was beyond our wildest dreams.”
Edging out Miami Trace Local Schools, the winner in the food drive was Washington Court House City Schools with a grand total of 1,849 pounds of food.
“We were very, very happy to participate, it wasn’t last minute notice, but we didn’t get started as early as we hopefully do next year,” Tom Bailey, Washington Court House City Schools Superintendent said. “It was nice to hold a friendly competition with Miami Trace.”
Bailey said the day of the football game between the Panthers and Blue Lions, he received an email about how the school was doing in the food drive, which at the time was not looking good as Miami Trace was winning. The email had asked Bailey, “If there was anything he could do to stop this from happening,” and he said he went to their “All-Call” system.
“I used that to call our school families and sent out a message to those that we were coming to the game versus Miami Trace to bring some canned goods with them so that we would potentially not only win the football game, but the food drive as well,” Bailey said. “It seemed to work because we overtook them during the game. I would like to thank the entire community, specifically the Washington Court House community because they were working hard all week to bring in canned goods and do extra things to make this happen in our schools. But congratulations to the whole county, both school districts, we were able to do something really worthwhile, especially for those who may have needs and are short on food. As we approach the cold and holiday season, it really shows the spirit of camaraderie to do good for our community.”
“We are currently already talking about next year’s food drive and hope you will once again partner with us to help us help others,” organizers wrote. “Thank you again for everything you did to help make this a huge success.”
