Clark County residents adapted quickly in December when the annual Walk & Knock food drive was reimagined as Drive & Drop for the pandemic era, and on Saturday a group of volunteers decided to see if that community enthusiasm could fuel a second round of donations for the Clark County Food Bank.
December’s Drive & Drop brought in more than 134,000 pounds of food and an exceptionally large round of cash donations, according to the nonprofit’s website, but the new format was not able to fully match the usual Walk & Knock intake – 2020’s food tonnage was a little more than half of what the drive collected in 2019.
Craig Limoges of the Fort Vancouver Lions Club said the club’s leadership hoped that a new food drive following the same model might be able to make up some of the difference. A supplemental drive in March had never been done before, so he said the club kept it relatively small-scale, treating it as a sort of experiment to see how the community would respond to an early spring event.
“It’s a learning experience,” he said.
Saturday’s standalone event didn’t use the title Drive & Drop, although it followed a similar collection setup in the parking lot of the Living Hope Church on Northeast Andresen Boulevard, focusing on non-perishable food and cash donations.
Most of the volunteers were from the Lions Club or members of Boy Scout Troop 358, which meets at the Vancouver Church in Hazel Dell. The scouting group is heavily involved in food drive efforts – the troop’s assistant scoutmaster, Adam Hegewald, is also the vice president of operations at the Walk & Knock nonprofit.
The Drive & Drop model proved to be especially popular with seniors, Hegewald said, because the pandemic has severely curtailed their ability to visit public places and participate in community events. A high proportion of Drive & Drop donors were above the age of 50, he said, and the same pattern appeared to be happening on Saturday.
“It’s been great for those folks,” he said.
Later in the day, Limoges said donor traffic had started out slow but picked up throughout the morning, and the drive pulled in an estimated 2,000 pounds of food by the end of the day.
Saturday’s event was planned as a one-off, but Hegewald said the Lions and Scouts could end up planning follow-ups or establishing a new recurring event depending on the kind of response the first attempt garners a strong response.
“I could see this happening maybe once a quarter or even semi-annually,” he said.
The challenge would be to avoid bumping up against other regular food drives, he added, because the group doesn’t want to “muddy the waters” and siphon away participation from other events like the annual Letter Carriers’ “Stamp Out Hunger” food drive in May.
The need for food support is at an all-time high due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the Clark County Food Bank’s 2020 Annual Report, president Alan Hamilton wrote that “we’ve never seen demand like the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic brought our way” – although he also noted that the bank brought in more food than ever, in part because “food drives sprung up everywhere.”
In another example of a new impromptu food drive, the Vancouver Sunrise Rotary Club announced Wednesday that it has teamed up with the owners of Kafiex Roasters in downtown Vancouver to set up a donation drop-off site at the coffee shop on the weekend of March 20.
The timing is intended to coincide with the return of the Vancouver Farmers Market that same weekend. The market sets up along Esther Street between West Sixth Street and West Eight Street. Kafiex is located at the upper end of that block, at 720 Esther Street.
