Every other month of the year, beginning this year with February, the Sedona Food Council launches another Food Neighbors Project Green Bag drive. And every other month, the Village of Oak Creek volunteers hit the top of the list in terms of the amount of food collected.
This is compared to other communites such as Sedona, Camp Verde, Cottonwood and even Prescott and Prescott Valley — all of which boast higher population numbers.
The drive itself is simple. Neighborhood site coordinators sign up with the food council and have donors ready when they do. Then, when collection day comes around, the coordinators simply go around to their lists of donors and pick up green bags full of non-perishable food. There are also specific collection sites to drop off food — such as Weber’s IGA in the Village of Oak Creek. The food is then redistributed to emergency food providers like food banks by the food council.
The simplicity of the effort is one of the many reasons why the site coordinators chose the program in the first place.
Louise Dircks, a volunteer of two years, said, “I was very involved back in Michigan, where I’m from, in the local food pantry organization and I wanted to continue that …. I liked the approach the [food council] had with the green bags. It was very easy to do, for me as a coordinator and for all the donors.”
Dircks cited her community’s success to the close relationships the neighborhood coordinators make with their donors. She said she was proud of the group’s accomplishments.
“I’d like to see more participation,” she said, adding that a friendly competition between the VOC and Sedona might be fun.
Carol Higgins, coordinator for more than two years, said she got into it for the reward gained from helping people and to fill a need in the community. She’s also involved in food collection through Christ Lutheran and Keep Sedona Beautiful litter lifter.
“The food thing is becoming more and more of a problem with rising food prices …. So I think it’s a really good thing to be involved in a wonderful community where we have so many volunteers.”
Jackie Faupel, a coordinator since April, saw the need for donors in the paper, joined up with her neighbor.
“I think this is a very generous community and I think the people involved in the program are good about reminding their donors to make sure they are available,” she said. She also said that coordinators are willing to go the extra mile and pick up on a different date should a donor be out of town or fill in for a vacationing volunteer.
Noreen Lisowski, a two-year coordinator, said that in the beginning, the program spread through word-of-mouth to next-door neighbors. Now, she said the program is much more organized, attributing the group’s dominance at the top to getting out to a particularly generous community.
“I was really surprised about the amount of people who go hungry here. You think of Sedona as a really affluent community and this problem is kind of invisible,” she said. “The [needy] are more visible now than when I moved here.”
Leah Kolb is the collection site coordinator, and has been with the program since its inception in the VOC.
“Our first collection event was quite small. It was so fun, though, that we’ve really just been able to build up in the Village. The biggest difference [since the beginning] is the participation.
People just want to be part of something that’s so simple,” she said.
She equated the act of being a donor or volunteer to giving blood. It’s an easy act that doesn’t happen often or take up much time, but it makes a large difference.
“It’s a couple of hours on a Saturday, big deal,” she said. “And I find that that’s what makes it so attractive to people.”
In addition, as many other volunteers stated, she feels the VOC is a much tighter community than West Sedona,
or Uptown.
“We only have one grocery store, so if you go to Weber’s you see the same people there,” she said. “It’s less of a vacation spot so it really is a tight community.”
Working with emergency food providers, such as St. Vincent de Paul, helps bring out volunteers as well.
Kolb is no stanger to hunger either. When she was first married, she said they struggled and reached out for help. She said one of the great things about these drives is it allows a greater variety of food which can then be selected by the family or resident in need, which adds dignity to a oft-perceived low act.
The next Food Neighbors Green Bag drive will be on Saturday morning, Feb. 13. Call 254-8172 to reach the Yavapai Food Council office.
