St. Patrick's Day Parade Food Drive

Corey Ripper, Food Sourcing Coordinator for Second Harvest Community Food Bank shares how we can help gather food on Saturday.

Jodie: the st.

Patrick's day parade will be a go this saturday and the ancient order of the hibernians will conduct the parade food drive along the route this year.

Joining us is corey ripper, the coordinator for second harvest food bank.

Welcome, corey.

Hello.

Jodie: corey, what is the food bank looking for for this specific drive?

We're looking for anything non-perishable, so canned food, cereal, granola bars, canned vegetables,, anything that is not going to spoil out and have to be refrigerated, basically dried goods.

Jodie: wonderful.

I know as a food sourcing coordinator, your job has probably been so incredibly busy this last year, and thanks for all you do for our community, so for those items, should they be bagged up or is it okay to hand over a sack of good or should we just hand can cans, you know what i mean?

The sacks would be a good way to hand it off.

Obviously we can accept cans just by themselves, but it just makes it easier to grab and go if it's bagged up.

Either way is good with us.

Jodie: can you talk to us about food insecurity in st.

Joseph?

What is it like right now?

Are people still struggling as much as they were at the height of the pandemic?

Most definitely still.

About one in five children in our territory, so about 20% of children are food insecure.

And within our 19 counties, service territories, that averages out to be about 54,000 people.

This year alone, we donated about 9.8 million meals to our communities.

So we've been working really hard and trying to stay attached with everybody and helping them out in any way we can.

Jodie: again, st.

Patrick's day parade is saturday beginning at noon on noyes and fed rick and it will finish at 5th and felix.

Corey, thanks for being with us.

See you saturday.

Thanks a lot.

Jodie: we'll see