Holiday Baskets
The "Holiday Baskets" event, conducted a day or so before Thanksgiving and Christmas Day, has grown into a tradition since it first started in 1999 when fifty dinners were distributed just before Thanksgiving. Each year since then approximately 125 to 210 sacks have been filled and delivered with all the ingredients necessary for a holiday family dinner, including a cooked premium ham, frozen vegetables, cranberry sauce, canned mixed fruit, Jell-O, 10 lbs of potatoes, dinner rolls, frozen pumpkin pie with cool whip, and a boxed cake mix with frosting at Christmas time. The average cost to put together a typical holiday dinner is approximately $25.00.

KSYZ 107.7 FM Radio has been highly instrumental in helping raise funds on an annual basis by conducting a one-day radio blitz and other fund raisers before Christmas. Visit www.theindependent.com Search Project Hunger, then #19, for additional information.

As of Christmas, 2007, a total of approximately 1,400 Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners have materialized through a combination of efforts, including our gracious Lord's blessing. The past two years saw Project Hunger's "Harvest Festival for Hunger Awareness" at the Grand Generation Center in Grand Island, NE before Thanksgiving fund the major portion of the "Holiday Baskets" event needs.

One year students from Elba Public Schools in Elba, NE, took up a collection of $72.19 before Thanksgiving and delivered it to the office of KSYZ in Grand Island, NE. They also nominated four families from their surrounding area to receive the dinners. On the day the dinners were given out for delivery, a volunteer fireman from the Elba Fire Department drove nearly fifty miles to Grand Island where Project Hunger volunteers met him at an elementary school where the bags were being packed. He picked up the bags and saw that all of them were delivered.

One of the four Grand Island "Fire Companies" has been instrumental each Thanksgiving and Christmas by having members from their unit come and help sack holiday dinners for volunteers to pick up. Captain Troy Hughes, along with his unit, show up at the school’s parking lot with a fire truck, ambulance and personnel carrier. If they don’t have an emergency, they stay for about one and a half to two hours preparing sacks and helping deliver them to cars and pickup trucks with waiting volunteers on site. If they do have an emergency, they're gone, calling for "back up" from other fire stations to help take their place. The firemen also help deliver dinners to their destination if an occasional delivery volunteer person doesn't show up. Normally, the whole process of drivers with three or four pickup trucks gathering at a food center's warehouse to the last holiday dinner en route for delivery takes less then two hours.

Many hands usually make the task small.

NEWS COVERAGE:

Pass the Buck and help stock the community food pantry
Lack of food a problem right here in Grand Island

Poinsettas with Christmas dinners.

Holiday baskets:
68 dinners ready to be delivered - 2002

Project Hunger bunch in a festive pose.

Address: 410 W. 2nd St., PO BOX 967, Grand Island, NE 68802
Phone: (308)385-1590 Fax: (308) 385-1590
E-mail: projecthunger@projecthunger.org

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