Tag Archives: tote bag 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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Dan Savage, The Slog Raise Nearly $30,000 for Food Pantry – Make Sure People KNOW LGBTQ Folks Welcome at Pgh Pantries

I was poking around tonight and found this series of posts on The Slog website.

I love that people can win dinner with Dan Savage for donating to a hunger relief organization. I would donate and I work for a hunger relief organization.

I love that they picked up on the article in Slate about the QUADRUPLE impact of donating money versus food items. I think there are pros to both approaches, but it is a discussion worth having. And a discussion I rarely hear in the LGBTQ community, frankly.

Why not?

The Pittsburgh AIDS Task Force has a food pantry, supported by Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank. It is for PATF clients so not exclusive to LGBTQ folks, of course. But it should be a red flag that food insecurity hits our community. That’s why its great that the Gay & Lesbian Community Center of Pittsburgh has opened up their doors to accept tote bag donations from Downtown and surrounding areas. It is great that the GSA at CCAC organized a tote drive, collecting over 200 bags (from students!) It is also great the local openly gay podcast host and grad student Jason Lucarelli is on a quest to collect 500 tote bags as part of his graduate work at Carlow University.

Poverty has a tremendous impact in our community, disproportionately so in the transgender community. You know why — we have tenuous security and protections in our workplaces, lack of domestic partner benefits, economic challenges of finding appropriate health care even with insurance, lack of housing security, lack of a family safety net, safety, etc, etc, etc. There are a lot of reasons why being LGBTQ makes you more vulnerable to hunger than the average American, but there are certainly plenty of reasons why the average American is right here in this boat with us all.

I know some people don’t like Dan Savage and that’s fine. This project was not about the queer community, but it certainly was another good example of sending out the word that there is no stigma to getting involved with a hunger relief project. If you need help, please go to the Food Bank website and use their tools to find your local food pantry. If you can’t find what you need, call the Food Bank. Call Just Harvest. Call ME! Don’t be hungry in Pittsburgh because you are unsure if LGBTQ folks are welcome or treated fairly.

If you aren’t made to feel welcome and valued, definitely call me. We’ll make it right.

If your LGBTQ and/or allied organization would like to be part of this effort to help feed our neighbors, please consider organizing a tote bag drive (with food!)

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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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