The company I work for has a campaign going on encouraging employees to perform a total of 60,000 hours of community service this year (about 6 hours per employee) in honor of the firm's 60th anniversary. Our team, the Intranet Services Group, recently spent a morning at the Alameda County Community Food Bank sorting food and putting it on the shelves.
The ACCFB supplies food for about 300 agencies in Alameda County. Presently 40,000 people in the county are in need of food every week, and these numbers are expected to increase given the declining state of the economy. Many of the people in need of food are the working poor, who have to make choices on whether to pay their bills for housing or food. Donations of higher quality salvage food has declined over the past ten years with computerized inventory control in grocery stores, and the increasing number of discount outlets. There wasn't a huge variety of nutritional packaged foods. For example, we saw a lot of salad dressings, macaroni and cheese, coffee and cake mixes. The ACCFB has increased their attempts to secure fresh produce to account for this deficiency. Still, the food bank distributes only about a half of a bag of groceries per person each week.
Our team of ten sorted and shelved 3,500 pounds of food. In most cases, the food came directly off the shelves as quickly as we were able to put it up. We really enjoyed the work though. It was a nice change of pace from sitting at a computer all day and was a good team building exercise. The team agreed that we will go back again.
The most common remark will be that each day is arranged around training.
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