Nearly one in six U.S. citizens regularly go hungry, according to the Feeding America network, a national hunger-relief organization. The United States Postal Service is giving everyone a chance to help someone in need with its 26th annual Stamp Out Hunger food drive.
The National Association of Letter Carriers and the U.S. Postal Service ask that county residents leave bags of healthy nonperishable and canned goods by their mailboxes on Saturday, May 12.
Postal workers will carry the food in their trucks to the post office, where it will be weighed it out and distributed as evenly as possible to local food banks, said Michael Robinson, a mail carrier at the post office in Brunswick.
“What we’re asking for is canned goods and nonperishables to be set by the mailbox and we’ll come pick them up. That’s for both rural (Glynn County) and the city (of Brunswick),” said Robinson, who helps organize the event.
While there has been a slight decline in local donations in recent years, Glynn County mail carriers collected about 140,000 pounds of food donations annually.
Donations go to whichever local food panties ask for them, which Robinson said usually includes Feed My Sheep, Safe Harbor, Sparrow’s Nest, Bethel Baptist Church, Fishers of Men and Christian Renewal Baptist Church, among others.
At the national level, Stamp Out Hunger is the largest one-day food drive in the world, Robinson said. Mail carriers collected around 71 million pounds of food last year and more than a billion in the last 25 years, he added.
Wright Culpepper, executive director of the Sparrow’s Nest food bank, estimated they receive around two to three pickup trucks’ worth every year from the event.
The Sparrow’s Nest serves between 350 and 400 people a week, so the food it receives generally lasts between one and three weeks, he said.
“It’s always a boost to have the food drive here in May,” Culpepper said. “It’s not like it’s going to last us all summer, but it does help us at the end of the school year when the school food drives end.”
Culpepper added that donations directly to Sparrow’s Nest can be dropped off anytime at 2911 Altama Ave. in Brunswick.
Feed My Sheep, a food pantry run by St. Athanasius Episcopal Church, distributes food, clothing and books twice a month to around 125 people.
Velma Crosby, a St. Athanasius parishioner who manages the program, said the food the program gets from the mail carriers’ drive goes a long way.
“We get probably about 40 to 50 (mail carrier) baskets filled with groceries, and it pretty much gets us through the summer months,” Crosby said.
Donations can also be dropped off at the church, 1321 Albany St. in Brunswick.
For more information, call the Brunswick post office at 912-280-1250 or visit stampouthungerfooddrive.us.
