GREENFIELD — The Rotary Club of Greenfield is making substantial donations to eight local food pantries with the takeaway from its Fill a Truck, Fill a Pantry event Saturday: 755 cases of food and 696 cases of bottled water.
That is a significant improvement over the first event in 2018, which collected 420 cases of food.
Volunteers and Greenfield city employees collected donations Saturday in the parking lot at Walmart.
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Seven local food pantries and food banks will benefit: the Angel Connection Food Pantry, Brandywine Church Food Pantry, Hancock County Food Pantry, Kenneth Butler Memorial Soup Kitchen, Hancock County Meals on Wheels, Shirley-Wilkinson UMC Food Pantry and Vineyard Community Church Food Pantry.
Rotary service chair and event organizer Brian Lott said the drive was so successful that the club was also able to provide 25 cases of food to Hancock Hope House, which was not on its original list of beneficiaries.
According to Feed America, approximately 6,900 families in Hancock County are food-insecure. Lott said the event’s donations to multiple organizations are meant to reach those in need all over the county.
Lott said some of the biggest donations came from employees of Stanley Black and Decker’s Greenfield operations center and Eden Elementary School. Both collected over 2,000 items.
This year, the event also included a blood drive in honor of the late Eastern Hancock High School student Riley Settergren. The drive collected 28 units of blood, enough to benefit 84 patients in need of transfusions.
“Every available spot (to donate blood) was full,” Lott said.
Lott said he was gratified by the generosity of the community in both donations and volunteer time.
“It was a great cooperative effort between several civic groups and several of the local businesses,” Lott said.