2) Your donations are secured in my garage and CUMAC will either be sending a truck for them tomorrow or I'll take them down to Paterson on Thursday with the kids.
3) Our next food drive is December 4th and it pretty much follows the same procedure as this one. Just reply to this email with your address in the subject line and you'll be on the pick up list for the 4th. I'll be sending out a reminder email just after Thanksgiving in case anyone forgets.
To stay up to date with the Drive By please 'like' our Facebook page - http://www.facebook.com/pages/
You can stop reading now, but if you want our origins read on:
I work in Norwood, NJ at the local public school and our students conducted a 'fill a backpack' drive in September to support the Paterson Schools as they were devastated by Hurricane Irene. I've done some work with CUMAC/ECHO (www.cumacecho.org) before and know them to be a very reputable and very grassroots organization. We collected around $3,000 worth of school supplies, but during the dropoff I noticed how bare the shelves were at CUMAC.
Stephanie Ames, volunteer coordinator at CUMAC, shared with me that the need has been higher than ever and that donations are at their lowest. They are responsible for feeding roughly 100 families a week for a total of 400 people. That's every week, year round. Needless to say that's a lot of food.
When I got home I was speaking with my three kids Jimmy, Meg and Jack about what I saw at CUMAC and we came up with the idea of asking our friends to leave some food out on Sunday morning and we'd be happy to run it down to Paterson. Well, we reached out to a few close friends and I set up both this email address, the Blogspot webpage and the Facebook account and that's how we got started.
Going from 12 to 58 families occurred due to word of mouth, please continue to take part and please spread the word to your friends. Quick Math - if everyone Ridgewood resident donated four cans of food each that would be 100,000 cans of food. A little bit from a lot of people really adds up when you think about it.
If you need anymore background information or anything else, please reach out to me via this email address or mrgatens@gmail.com
Thanks and have a great night.
Brian, Kathie, Jimmy, Meg and Jack Gatens
Sheffield Road, Ridgewood, NJ, USA
