Tons of food, tons of exercise, and tons of fun

Steve Green and Mark Lincourt wait for more mail trucks to arrive with more donated food. See more photos below text.

Friends,

The 2011 Letter Carriers’ Food Drive on Saturday, May 14, was both a learning experience for the volunteers of the Friendship Center Food Pantry and a very rewarding experience for us.

It was a rewarding experience because the letter carriers of the North Adams Post Office collected 7,947 pounds of food along the routes they serve in North Adams, Clarksburg and Florida. Some will go to the Salvation Army, some to the Berkshire Food Project, and most of it to the Friendship Center.

Stuart Crampton, who helped out in Williamstown, told me they collected 2,416 pounds of food there for their pantries.

With the help of people at the post office and our typical group of wonderful volunteers — as well as three fine young men who were walking down Main Street who we persuaded to help us at one point — we managed to get most of this food into a holding space at 107 Main St. and the rest of it (about 5 percent) into the Friendship Center. We will be sorting it over the next couple of weeks.

Contact our volunteer coordinator, Denise Krutiak, denisekrutiak@yahoo.com if you want to help with this.

This food drive was a learning experience for us, because now we know how it is publicized, how it proceeds, and how many volunteers are needed unload and move the food. Next year we will get more volunteers, so each of us will not have to work as hard as we did this year. And those who were there for several hours worked very hard.

And we will also know how to do things if we have access to the same space and a Zumbathon is held on Main Street at the same time as we are unloading the food!

Finally, in addition to the letter carriers and their local supervisors, I wish to thank Jack Gould and the United Way for buying us volunteers pizza and soda, and thanks also to Scarafoni Associates for use of 107 Main St.

Thanks, too, to all who donated food!

God Bless,

Mark

Some of the donated food, seen at floor level.

Volunteers work on organizing some of the food inside of 107 Main St.

Volunteers and post office people await arrival of more letter carriers and donated food.

The Zumba-thon on Main Street in front of 107 Main ruled out parking the truck by the front door with the second load of food.

But we are resourceful people and took the food in the back door.