Wood Buffalo Food Bank hosts first major food drive in 2 years
Global News
The Fort McMurray food bank is finally able to host its first major food drive. It comes following a two-year hiatus due to the pandemic.
When flooding devastated Fort McMurray in the spring of 2020, Canadians stepped up to help the community any way they could.
“We had 700,000 pounds of food come up to us,” Dan Edwards said, executive director of the Wood Buffalo Food Bank.
“We were able to sort of ride that wave of 700,000 pounds to get us through those times where we weren’t able to host a food drive.”
Now that supply is dwindling. Factor in several waves of COVID-19 and the number of people leaning on the food bank steadily grew.
“Then we moved — so now we’re kind of getting settled and we’re in a place that we were able to host a food drive again,” Edwards explained.
This weekend the food bank hosted its first food drive since 2019.
They tried to host one last Christmas season, but because they couldn’t have volunteers, it only raised roughly 8,000 lbs of food. As for this weekend, their goal was 80,000 lbs.
“It takes about 600 volunteers for us to pull this event off,” Edwards said.