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FARMINGTON – The hard rain this morning kept the younger helping hands of the food pass in their classrooms, but that didn’t stop the dozens of volunteers who showed up to help collect, sort and transport tons of donated food in the 18th Annual Helping Hands Food Project.
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Since the end of October, hundreds of students at W.G. Mallett School and Cascade Brook School have been collecting dry and canned goods in their classrooms to be donated to the Care & Share Food Closet, which serves the Farmington and several neighboring towns.
On a drier day, Mallett School’s kindergarten through third-grade students line up and, like a human conveyor belt, pass the bags of donated food from the school to the nearby Farmington Community Center. The fourth-grade through sixth-grade students from Cascade Brook School, about a half mile away, walk down to the center to deliver their donations personally.
This year, however, students will stay dry while the 30 volunteers from the Franklin County Retired Teachers’ Association and their friends move the food from the schools, mostly by minivan. Once boxed up at the center, Mt. Blue High School students in the Diversified Occupations Program arrive to help load and unload the boxes of food transported to the food pantry.
While watching the busy scene as volunteers quickly grabbed bags of food and moved them to boxes labeled for sorting in the lower level of the Community Center, Mt. Blue Regional School District volunteer coordinator Pauline Rodrigue smiled.
“It’s a huge boost for the food closet,” Rodrigue said “and a wonderful community service project.”
This afternoon, Rodrigue said more than 5,000 pounds of food was collected for the Care and Share Food Closet. “This is the second highest amount that we’ve collected since I started with the project,” she said and added, “I initially thought numbers would be down because of the economy, but people were very generous with their donations, as well as their time.”
