The first thing we did on our giving campaign was to volunteer at the Greater Chicago Food Depository. We did this through a group from Holy Name Cathedral that goes and volunteers on the first Saturday of every month. It was a group of ten people or so that drove from the church down to the GCFD complex just off Pulaski Rd. at about 42nd St. The complex is enormous - way bigger than I expected, and relatively new. It is a model of efficiency. The staff was great. They escorted us into the volunteer room, and gave us a quick initiation about what we would be doing that day and how it would all work. I was amazed to find out that the GFCD collects food for all of the pantries in the city, sorts it, repackages it and gets it out to the soup kitchens and smaller food depots all over the city. They get donations from individuals and from corporations as well as buying a small amount of food. They guarantee a stock of 18 basic items, including fresh milk and fresh eggs, year round. This is to ensure that the kitchens and pantries around the city can always meet a full range of nutritional needs for the people they service.
The day we were there, three tasks were being performed - making emergency food boxes, re-packing cereal from huge vats into smaller bags, and sorting and checking bread products. We were assigned to the Flex line, packing emergency food boxes. It is called the flex line because it can be set up to do a bunch of different packages. The boxes we were packing were for individuals who were in dire need of food as the result of a natural disaster, fire or other emergency. Each box contained about 25# of food and was intended to be enough to last 3-4 days for one person. They included things like soda crackers, cereal, powdered milk, raisins, peanut butter, jelly, canned chili and some other items. The process of getting all of this together was really incredible and amazingly efficient. There were about 50 volunteers. Some built the boxes and placed them on the line. Others filled the boxes, with still more volunteers behind them unwrapping the pallets of food and keeping the fillers stocked. Then there were people who picked up the garbage generated by all of the unwrapping. Jen and I did this job because we were not quick enough to get a spot on the line. The GFCD recycles all of the cardboard that comes from all of the packing of the pallets of food. As the boxes were filled, one team labelled each box while another team weighed each one (to make sure the right amount of food is in each box...) and still another team ran the boxes through a machine that tapes both the top and bottom of the box closed. The last step was a group that pulls the boxes off the line and stacks them on pallets to go into the warehouse until they are needed.
Once all of this gets organized, which took about half an hour, the lines rolls for about two hours. In that time, we packed around 1300 boxes of food, equivalent to a little more than 30,000 pounds. It was a workout! When the line was rolling, Jen and I had to scramble around and grab all the cardboard and shrink wrap that was coming off the line, which was more work than it sounds like. We also helped open trays of canned food to help keep the line stocked, and helped bring in more pallets of food as the ones we had were depleted. It was a lot of bending low and standing a little hunched over. For all that, we had a lot of fun, and had a good time joking with and getting to know the other volunteers. Some were old hands, and some were first timers, like us.
Once it was all over, we introduced a number of our co-workers to Ricobene's, a great little diner on Pulaski that serves these killer breaded steak sandwiches. We got to hear about a couple other volunteer opportunities from them, including a food pantry in Lakeview and a student mentoring program. In all, we had a great day and we will definitely come back and work here again. Everyone on the staff was friendly and knowledgeable and the palpable sense of knowing we were helping to feed someone was a rush we will not soon forget.
If you are interested in helping the GFCD, you can find their website here:
http://www.chicagosfoodbank.org
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