The Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service “Can”vas Food Drive collected 45 boxes of food as volunteers contended with wet weather Saturday and frigid temperatures on Sunday.
Amy Jeffers, assistant director for the Brown Bag Food Project, said about 70 volunteers took part.
“We had some dedicated volunteers who took back-to-back shifts,” she said. They would collect food then return to Grounds for Thought to get warm before hitting the streets again.
“We had some good volunteers,” she said.
But not enough.
While the number of volunteers was about the same as last year, as was the amount of food collected, both were down from 2018 the year before Bowling Green State University introduced its Winter Session.
Then students were on campus, and they volunteered for the food drive as well as dozens of other projects in the community.
Now with winter term very few students remain on campus with a majority of the 1,400 students enrolled taking online courses, doing internships elsewhere, or doing study abroad programs.
Jeffers said the drive can’t replace the couple hundred volunteers from previous years.
That means less food is collected to be distributed to the five food pantries, including Brown Bag, that divide of the proceeds of the drive.
Jeffers said though having a 12-year tradition of having the drive on Martin Luther King Jr Day weekend, the board needs to consider alternatives.
That’s the topic for the next Brown Bag board meeting. The food project runs the food drive.
Board members decided they’d work through this weekend before considering the options.
“We’re having that conversation now,” Jeffers said.
Included in those discussions is the BGSU Center for Public Impact.
Jeffers said: “We’ll have to come up with a different approach.”
