Postal workers collect donations for annual Stamp Out Hunger Food Drive
Letter carriers with the U.S. Postal Service returned to their stations with more than the mail this Saturday, May 11, after collecting donations of canned food and other non-perishable items from people's doorsteps and mailbox areas for the 2024 Stamp Out Hunger Food Drive.
About 200 postal workers from nine post offices in Corpus Christi began gathering donations along their routes at around 9 a.m. and continued throughout the day. Customers received a postcard in the mail a week before that they place on their donation bags to participate in the drive, a nationwide effort the National Association of Letter Carriers started 30 years ago and that now contributes tens of millions of pounds of food nationwide each year for needy families.
The food collected in Corpus Christi will go to the Coastal Bend Food Bank, while donations made in the neighboring cities of Alice, Falfurrias, Ingleside, Kingsville, Portland and Robstown will go to local churches or food pantries in their areas.
Carriers have collected as much as 80,000 pounds of food in past years, mostly in the form of canned goods, said Brian Schafer, the U.S. Postal Service station manager at the Lamar Park Post Office. Lamar Park is the largest post office in the city, where 45 carriers collected and unloaded food into donation crates this year.
More donations had been collected by Saturday afternoon than he'd seen at the same time last year, he said.
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"The union usually has a friendly competition to see who can raise the most food, including the neighboring cities to see what they can donate," Schafer said. "We'll collect and tag the crates with our station's name, so when it rolls to the food bank and the internal truck drivers take the crates there and drop them off, the food bank will weigh it to see who donated the most.
"Corpus Christi is bigger than the other towns, so we collect more than the rest, but within the state, there's competition," Schafer said.
Juan Munoz, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC), Branch 1259, who participates in the drive each year, said that greater awareness contributed to a higher number of donations this year, though the donations have gone down in weight due to a higher number of soft products including cereal and pasta.
"Letter carriers see firsthand the communities that are struggling when we walk the streets and deliver the mail," said Juan Munoz, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC), Branch 1259, which participates in the drive each year. "Most people donate at Christmas, Thanksgiving - the normal times. Right now, the food banks are starting to run low. Plus, kids are getting out of school for summer.
"This is a good way for us to replenish the food banks right when they need it most," he said. "A lot of kids do depend on school for their meals. When they go out for summer break, that's when families need to depend more on the food banks."
Food insecurity and hunger is prevalent across the U.S.
According to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service, 12.8% of U.S. households, or 17 million people, were food insecure in 2022, defined as facing uncertainty about having or being able to acquire enough food at some point during the year, or having enough food to meet the needs of all family members due to insufficient money or resources.
ERS data also shows Texas as the state with the second-highest rate of food insecurity in the U.S., at 16%, and that it is among the top 10 states where people face very low food security resulting in people self-reporting that they do not have enough to eat. One in eight people in Texas and one in five children in the Coastal Bend face hunger, according to the Coastal Bend Food Bank. Access to healthy food sources varies widely by neighborhood.
Since it officially started in 1993, the drive has grown to encompass 10,000 cities and towns in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and Guam, with tens of millions of pounds of food collected in a single day.
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This article originally appeared on Corpus Christi Caller Times: Coastal Bend postal workers collect for Stamp Out Hunger Food Drive
