A Day At The L.A Food Bank
For the past year my friend Rose and I have been trying our best to do as much community service as we can.
This month we registered at L.A. Works which would help us find various volunteering opportunities. L.A. Works is a non profit volunteer center founded in 1991 which creates different community service projects all throughout Los Angeles. Once you've created an account you are able to view the calendar in which are listed all the different events, which go from painting Halloween bags for children to feeding the homeless in Skid Row.
This weekend we singed up to spend our Saturday morning helping out at the L.A Food Bank.
The L.A Food Bank was founded in 1973 and since then have distributed about 1 billion pounds of food. They provide 280,500 people with food every month and just last year they were able to distribute 59 million pounds of food. The food bank distributes donated food, product and food provide by SSS and FEMA. Not only do they distribute to agencies all throughout the Los Angeles county but since 2005 have been able to distribute food to agencies in the Antelope Valley, the San Fernando Valley, the South Bay and East Los Angeles County thanks to their Agency Delivery Program. The food banks is currently associated with 700 agencies providing food to children, seniors, families and other individuals in need.
I honestly was about to cancel the night before because I didn't think I would be able to wake up at 7 in the morning. I am not a morning person and I'm not used to waking up early in the morning specially since I go to sleep at around 3 or 4 in the morning. Rose and I had met up with Ashley the night before went to a Halloween party in the valley and got home at 3:30 so we didn't think we'd wake up at 6:30 to print out the waivers and get ready. Rose was actually the one who woke up early and printed out everything and didn't wake me up until 7. Surprisingly enough I woke up instantly, grabbed an iced coffee out the fridge and we were ready to go.
We got to the food bank at 8 and waited for everyone to show up. Once most of the people had checked in we were led into the interior of the warehouse were they showed us a quick informative video and told use some of the safety regulations. We were divided into two groups. One group was in charge of checking expiration dates on the bread, packaging the bread and separating them by category (sliced bread, bagels, hot dog buns, hamburger etc.). The other half were in charge of making sure the fruits and vegetables weren't rotten and then packaging it. Rose and I were on the bread team. Luckily we had really fun and nice people on our team, we actually made a killer team! At the end we summed up the orders made and we had packaged 11,141 packages of sliced bread (keep in mind we also packaged about 5 more different categories of bread), which made us the team with the highest amount of packaged bread.
I had a lot of fun that morning and I can't wait to go back to the L.A Food Bank and keep doing community service all over LA with my best friend. We are actually thinking of making a team of volunteers and go out and do volunteering every weekend. If anyone out there wants to join my team send me an email and let me know!
if you want to do community service on your own make sure you sing up at L.A. Works here. If you would like to volunteer at the L.A. Food Bank click here.
