Tag Archives: food drive

Join Us For GAYla This Weekend at Pittsburgh Public Market

We’ll be participating in the second annual GAYla event at the Pittsburgh Public Market on Saturday from 9-5 and Sunday 10-4. It is a chance to meet some of the local organizations and LGBTQ owned businesses.

Stop by our booth to learn more about our blog and other social media tools. We’ll have coloring pages for kids and other fun stuff.

Pittsburgh Lesbian Correspondents will be raising funds & food for North Side Common Ministries, the largest food pantry in Western Pennsylvania serving 1,000+ families each month.

Stop by our table with a donation of food (totes!) or a cash donation to be eligible to win an official “YaJagoff” folding chair – just in time for spring! We have other goodies, too.

Hunger is an LGBTQ issue!

Reserve your parking space with Pittsburgh flair!

We’ll be accepting:

Food items – cereal, peanut butter, canned tuna/salmon/chicken, and more.
Feminine hygeine products
General hygeine products
Paper goods
Cleaning supplies
Financial donations

If you donate in a tote bag, you’ll save North Side Common Ministries a few pennies which add up to helping another family.

If you have questions about donations, feel free to email us ahead of time pghlesbian (at) gmail.

Thanks for helping us help our neighbors!

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Collect Tote Bags to Help Hungry Neighbors and Win Awesome Prizes (Like Penguins Tickets)

Hunger, as you probably have read here in the past, is very much a part of our lives … 1 in 7 people in Pennsylvania don’t know for sure where their next meal is coming from today. Look around you. Is it someone in your office? Someone living on your street? Some of the children on the school bus? Yes, yes it is.

The Pittsburgh Tote Bag Project collects gently used and new tote bags for distribution to the region’s food pantries, in partnership with Greater Pittsburgh Community Bank. The tote bags make it easier to transport more food home. There are only so many plastic bags someone can carry, especially on the bus or with several households crammed into one car.

Thanks to some generous donors, they are offering YOU some very nice presents for contributing to our cause. It is pretty simple:

Register on the website.
Collect at least 25 tote bags by December 22.
Bring the bags to a drop-off spot and report in via email or phone.
That’s it!
Drawing will be held on December 23.

Prizes include: $50 gift card to The Cheesecake Factory, $50 gift basket from East End Food Co-op, $65 value Holiday Heritage basket from Rivers of Steel (including passes to the Carrie Furnace tour), movie passes, music, overnight stays at hotels, and more.

The grand prize for the person who collects the most tote bags is a pair of passes for box seats for a Penguins tickets (you can pick the date from several.)

You have almost two weeks to collect totes. How about sending a quick email to your coworkers, neighbors, and friends?

You can collect 25 totes pretty quickly by simply asking your immediate circle. Ask your boss for leftover PR bags. Ask folks to bring a tote to the office grab bag. Lots of ideas.

Lots of ways to WIN!

** As drawing takes place on December 23, prizes may not be available to you for December 25. You can pick your prize up from the Northside, but organizers won’t be able to deliver prizes until the week after Christmas Day.

What does this have to do with LGBTQ issues? Well, the Gay & Lesbian Community Center of Pittsburgh is a drop-off spot Downtown. The first student led tote drive was organized by the GSA at Community College Allegheny Campus. PATF has a food pantry that is part of the food bank network. The Ladies FallFling of Out to Dance held a very nice little drive. The Food Bank is gay friendly and it is important that we do our best to connect our neighbors and friends with food resources if they need them. Sometimes that can be intimidating because they are faith based agencies, but hunger knows no discrimination so usually its fine. But it can be intimidating so we need to work together.

I’ve learned that the GLCC gets phone calls about emergency food resources. We’ll make sure they are connected with the Food Bank to share that information. We are hoping to partner with the Food Bank to have a presence at PrideFest.

If you participate by donating tote bags and start that conversation with people in your life, you send a signal that LGBTQ folks can seek these services and expect to be treated with dignity and respect. If they share a need with you, you’ll know what to do to support them. And tote bags are something most people have — so if they don’t have food to donate, they may have a bag.

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Holiday Giving Opportunities

Mayor Caliguri looking over offerings of food in totes near the official City-County Christmas Tree, November 2011

The Pittsburgh Tote Bag Project is challenging you to organize a modest tote drive (25 bags) to be eligible to win some pretty nice stuff – Penguins box seats, overnight stay at a local Inn, movie passes, gift baskets and a $50 gift card to The Cheesecake Factory. You can probably collect 25 bags by simply asking your family and immediate friends with a quick email. Then take the person who donates the most bags with you for dinner at The Cheesecake Factory (or to the movies.) Tote and tote/food drives are needed on a year round basis to help meet the needs of the 120,000 people relying on Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank for food assistance.

Burghbaby’s ChristmasCrazy is underway through December 16, 2011. Help her provide gifts for the women and children at Alli-Kiski Hope Center and Womansplace shelters for families surviving domestic violence. This is a great project if you’d like to donate a toy or gift for an adult woman. New, unwrapped gifts and cash donations are being accepted.

I used to work at Womansplace when I was in graduate school. Everyone on the staff worked a 2 hour shift during the holidays to share the load and because we all wanted to be there. It is heartbreaking to watch a child’s delight at receiving a new pair of socks as a gift. But good, too.

Another great project is Light of Life Rescue Mission on the Northside which provides food and shelter services to support some of the City’s most vulnerable families. They are seeking donations of gift cards to distribute as holiday gifts … Target, Giant Eagle, Kmart, etc. You might be surprised at the fact that a gift card for a meal at Subway can provide a true moment of joy for a parent … trust me, it can.

If you visit all three projects, you’ll see that they aren’t seeking fancy high-end gifts … they are all trying to instill some dignity and practicality in their appeals … helping people with their basic needs, including the need to feel connected to the rest of us in the midst of the struggles they are addressing day to day. That isn’t so very different than what we strive to do for ourselves.

I can’t urge you enough to include your whole family in this giving … children can help select healthy kid-friendly foods or gifts. Siblings can pitch in $5 each and purchase a set of Subway gift cards. Everyone can check for their extra tote bags and carry their own presents along, leaving the bags to be passed along after the holiday. So many ways to share and give and truly celebrate the meaning of the season.

Thank you.

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Holiday Projects You Can Support

It is really early, but The Pittsburgh Tote Bag Project is working with local supporters to support the more than 120,000 people relying on Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank to reduce their hunger. You can help by organizing a special “holiday” project around hunger and recycling to help kids, adults and seniors throughout the region.

The statistics are stunning … 1 in 7 people in Pennsylvania is experiencing “food instability” which means they are not getting the appropriate amount of nutritious food to carry out day to day activities — in other words, they aren’t sure where their next meal is coming from. 1 in 4 children in the United States will be “hungry” at some point in their childhood.

You can make a difference by focusing some of your holiday goodwill and generosity on these issues and more importantly, the people whose lives depend on us to get through the month. One missed paycheck, one increase in a utility bill, one unexpected medical bill … it could be any one of us. It probably will some of us at some point.

For more information, please visit this site and learn how you can get involved.

1. Donate a tote with food for a holiday meal.

Box/canned potatos, vegetables, box of stuffing,

Ready made pie crust, pie filling, nonperishable whipped topping

Add water bread, cornbread mixes.

2..Wrap gifts that you give in
festive tote bags and ask recipients to donate after they “unwrap.”

Saves wasting wrapping paper which may not often be recyclable

Lots of great totes at local retailers

3. Donate a gift card that we can use to purchase totes or supplies.

Amost any major retailer has tote bags for sale

a small “gift card drive” is a great team project

YOU can benefit from FuelPerks and other special programs

4. A gift donation in honor of someone/as a gift.

A simple tribute to a loved one who was concerned about hunger and/or the
environment

A “stocking stuffer” gift to reinforce the reason for the season

Great idea for a “crafty” person

5. Stocking stuffer totes

Socks, gloves, scarves, hats and other small items along this direction

Candy (nonperishable)

Personal care items – soaps, body lotions, shampoos, combs/brushes

Personal care items FOR KIDS – toothpaste, toothbrushes, combs/brushes,
soap/bubble bath, baby powder, baby items, anything along this line

Small gift items – puzzle books, fun pencils and pens, coloring books,
reading glasses, note pads, etc.

6. Buy One/Get One – BOGO

Check your coupons and your grocery store aisles for BOGO specials.

Buy one for your household, get the second free to donate.

Put together your “get ones” and donate.

We need your help to keep basic needs in our line of sight during a very magical time of year. The food and bags we collect during the next 10 weeks will be on food pantry shelves in January and February when the utilities costs increase and the time waiting in line for the food pantry or the bus or the walk home is something we would avoid if possible.

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