Final  Fill A Bag, Feed a Family report
Congratulations to everyone!

By Ben Askren, Aurora Club President

After nine months of planning, re-planning and more re-planning, the My Fill a Bag team is happy to announce that, thanks to the generosity of our neighbors, a record 26,400 lbs. of food were collected. This is 2 tons more than any previous drive.

Altogether, over 400 local volunteers donated their time to make this a success.  For most adult volunteers, it was an opportunity to show their children the importance of helping others--. This is a great Aurora tradition.

Both the Volunteers of America-Aurora Food Pantry and the Aurora Family Relief Fund were very pleased with the results.

Because there was so much food collected, smaller amounts were shared with the Food for Friends pantry in Bainbridge and the Mantua backpack program.

Further, 100% of the cash donations will go toward fresh produce and will be deposited into the 2 Aurora Pantry’s accounts at the grocer of their choice.

I apologize for the delay in getting this good news to all of you. I have been focused on writing “thank you’s” and 501-c-3 letters to the over 100 families that sent in a cash donation. $8,055.00 has been received to date. (I believe that no additional donations will be coming in.)

To make this result possible, it took a tremendous effort from  many wonderfully devoted leaders and some incredible donations from local companies/Churches.

Scott McFerren, (who lives in Hudson!) was the co-chair of this drive and along with Steve Waisala and Barry Wessels, conducted planning meetings back in October of last year. This team created an entirely new way to meet Covid-19 challenges and still reduce the food collection and processing time by over 2 Hours. Despite having to collect a record amount of food, the design enabled  volunteer families to donate time but not get exhausted in the process.

Chuck Marusic is the master of transportation and again provided excellent direction for all volunteer drivers and their families.

Walden has been a huge part of the drive’s success. Jim Fisher worked closely with us and communicated everything needed to his 13 Walden association groups. Miriam and Ryan Conner, handled all the bag delivery and food pick-up in the stand alone Walden homes for the 7^th straight year. And Carol Cole, once again, handled all the signage and bag deliveries (with help from Eileen Gaston)  to all the Walden condo families-- and there are almost 700 of them!!

Jeff Filarski took on the task of doing 3 straight days of food collection at the Walden mail huts. He and Mike Fritz moved about 3,000 lbs of food around during that time.

And I cannot forget the support that we are given by our Mayor Ann Womer Benjamin. She and Kris Allen teamed up to remove roadblocks at the local Aurora Advocate and enabled promotion of this event.

Mary Kohanski  and school Superintendent Michael Roberto supported every facet of this project, even to the point where teacher Mr. Logalbo brought 18 members of the football team to help move almost 700 bins (loaded with  food) to our warehouse. Melissa Foster and her school Interact- student volunteer group were great helps and one member, Lydia Schiopota, managed our social media efforts!

But this project needed other areas of help that we critical to its success.

Amy McDougald Eckard and Erik Eckard provided, at no cost, 2 huge lift-gate trucks to move a mountain of supplies and food . That was a back saver!!

John and Terri Updyke, owners of Mad Jacks and The 1815 Tavern and Grill, rewarded all the volunteers (who worked to sort and store the donated food) by providing a large variety of pizzas and salads on two different occasions.

Ann Yan, owner of Surge Industrial not only supplied us with a place to do our final sorting but also a place to store the food. Without this donation--- there is no drive.

Christ Community Chapel, (Pastors Mark Lile and Todd Iannetta led this effort) did four-color printing on 6,000 letters  and 100 posters and also provided a location for us to process and store (for a week) all the food donations. They also provided the location for the registration of all the events.

Many churches pitched in to help roll bags like Cornerstone Church along with Christ Community Chapel/Aurora, The Church in Aurora, and especially Our Lady of Perpetual Help. Thank you Jeff Botos, Mary Corrigan and Father Conoboy. You helped so much in so many areas.

As always, Aurora’s incredible group of instant volunteers--- the Rotary Club of Aurora, provided all 6,000 bags that were delivered and volunteers from their membership.

Dave Pavlick of Pavlick Marketing, provide the most unseen but critically needed support—financial donations to pay for the cost associated with running the drive. For years Dave has chosen to be the “anonymous donor” that help keep the operations side afloat. He is a previously “unheralded hero”.

Finally, everyone has seen the over 700 bins that we use to collect food. Those bins have been donated by the wonderful people at Akro-Mills in Seville, Ohio.

How generous is that company to donate to families far away in Aurora?!?!?!

As all of you (that were kind enough to read this far) can see, an effort like this takes the help of many people. We all know that the effort is worth it because our neighbors in need won’t have to worry about feeding their families. Ultimately, that is what this whole project is about.

Remember how many families would suffer if all of us did not take the time to make a difference.

Thank you to everyone who pitched in to help this past year. (If I missed your name or gift---I apologize.)

God bless all of you,

Bruce
Bruce Harris, Executive Director – Food2Share Inc.

By Ben Askren, Aurora Club President