West Texas Food Bank has Earth Day plans

Apr. 12—For three years now, the West Texas Food Bank has partnered with Keep Midland Beautiful to celebrate Earth Day and bring awareness to the community.

That partnership will take place with this year's Earth Day event from 10 a.m. to1 p.m. April 17 at the Midland Food Bank facility in the new XTO Energy Innovative Gardens.

"We're excited to partner again with Keep Midland Beautiful to bring Earth Day to Midland and hopefully, get the word out to be good stewards of our environment and take care of our planet and to introduce people to the food bank who may not know that we've got extensive water reclamation programs," West Texas Food Bank communications and public relations coordinator Craig Stoker said.

Keep Midland Beautiful is a nonprofit organization that helps educate and engage Midlanders in litter prevention, beautification and waste management.

Over the years, the West Texas Food Bank has worked to educate the community with its gardening program, helping people to grow and eat seasonal fruits and vegetables.

"It's a unique partnership," West Texas Food Bank executive director Libby Campbell said. "Most of the time, when people think of the food bank, they think that we just feed people, which is the true core of what we do every day but we also have the responsibility of education that goes along with our work and what better way than to educate on the environment and take care of where we live and where that food comes from and how we take care of the earth."

The organization cultivates produce using its climate controlled greenhouses.

The West Texas Food Bank's Midland location won the Green Award from Feeding America for its initiatives in water reclamation and solar power.

"Our facilities use as much recycled materials as possible," Stoker said. "We were thinking about this even before the partnership started. We're excited to have people out."

The event will be a soft introduction of the XTO innovative gardens, located at 1601 Westcliff Drive in Midland.

"We're excited for those to be finished, hopefully in June where we can have everyone out and stuff planted and show off what we've been doing during the pandemic other than feeding lots of people," Stoker said. "We're going to have different groups coming in with all sorts of different activities."

Booths will be set in the parking lot area of the West Texas Food Bank and will feature organizations such as the I-20 Wildlife Preserve, the Goddard Junior High Teen Leadership, the Permian Master Gardeners, the Midland County Environmental Officers and the Llano Master Naturalists, just to name a few.

"We sat down and talked about what we could do together and Earth Day came up and we thought that would be a good time to partner up and also invite other organizations that love doing things with the community to come and participate," Keep Midland Beautiful executive director Doreen Womack said. "We got the organizations that will come out that day and will have everything from Master Naturalist to Master Gardeners to Goddard Junior High because they have a fantastic Recycling program and are working with their students to make them good stewards of the earth."

The event is free and open to the public.

"It's truly exciting for us to have an event that's open to the public and to come and see what the food bank has been doing over the last year which is truly important," Campbell said.

CDC guidelines on social distancing will be required and masks are encouraged.

Aside from safety guidelines, not much will be different with this year's Earth Day event, Stoker said.

"We know that it's still very advisable to follow CDC guidelines and we'll be practicing social distancing as much as possible," Stoker said. "But this is also an outdoor event so we feel like it's appropriate for people to come and take the best care of themselves and their neighbors and enjoy a lot of the local nonprofits that a lot of people may not know about."

Womack is excited to keep the partnership going with the West Texas Food Bank.

"They have wonderful gardens out there (including) their brand new garden that people will get to see," Womack said. "It seems like the right place to celebrate Earth Day. We love having this partnership. Some people might wonder what we have in common with them but West Texas Food Bank wants people to eat right and Keep Midland Beautiful wants to promote planting in the Permian Basin. It make sense to us to get together to celebrate the day."