With your help, letter carriers in the Quad Cities will help feed people over the summer. Tomorrow, the National Association of Letter Carriers will pick up bags of non-perishable food left at mailboxes for the Riverbend Food Bank.
Michelle O'Neill reports the group could use more volunteers to help with its annual Stamp Out Hunger Food Drive.
Summary
Tracey Bultinck, whose delivery route is in Rock Island, has been coordinating the city's food drive for the last few years. She says many people think about donating food around the holidays. But when it's almost summer, the food bank is more empty.
On Saturday, volunteers will drive around neighborhoods picking up bags of food. Others will take bags that letter carriers have already collected to post offices. And they'll help pack boxes at the post offices and load them onto pallets.
She says a couple of locations where volunteers will be needed include Davenport's Main Post Office on West 2nd Street from noon until 3 pm, and the Moline Post Office on 17th Street tomorrow from 3 to 6 pm. People may also go to their own post offices and offer to pitch in. Or donate online.
The letter carriers association relies on help from the United Way, Riverbend Food Bank, and the Quad City Federation of Labor. And Bultinck says this year, local members of the United Food and Commercial Workers union will help out for the first time.
It's the 25th anniversary of the Stamp Out Hunger Food Drive. It's provided more than 1.5 billion pounds of food throughout the country. And each year in the Quad Cities, the letter carriers deliver around 100,000 pounds to the food bank.
