Food Drive Final Push

      This article will be the final push for this year’s food drive. The food drive cards, and the food drive bags have been sorted out and are in a trailer at the Hicksville post office waiting to go to the plant for distribution to your local post office. All the offices should receive food drive cards for all the routes in your office. Food drive Coordinators and shop stewards if you need extra cards, please contact me immediately and I will try and get them to you. Food drive bags I did not have enough bags to disperse to all the offices. The offices that received the bags may not have received enough for all the deliveries in your office. This was not a mistake, as I tried to get bags to as many offices as I could with the number of bags that we had left over from the last food drive.  Food drive coordinators and shop stewards it is your responsibility to make sure that the cards and bags get delivered to the customers in your town. These cards and bags should be treated as first-class mail. I do not want to see them being dumped into the waste bucket. Each office has just the right number of cards, so any in the waste means the carriers are not delivering them. Just a little head up between Island Harvest, USPS, and NALC, we will be conducting random phone calls to customers in some towns to ask if they received the food drive cards. You do not want to be on that list!   Starting May 1st, I am asking all the carriers to start spreading the news about the food drive we are having on May 13th, to your customers as you deliver the mail to them, even into businesses that you deliver to. The more publicity and exposure that we can give the better the outcome will be. Due to the pandemic, a dramatic increase to more than 42 million people, including 13 million children experience hunger every day. Most food banks face resource depletion in the late spring as they receive most donations during the winter holiday months.  This food drive provides enough food to help replenish food pantry shelves that are depleted this time of the year.   Remember the food that we collect stays here on Long Island to help feed the needy in your local communities. The needy are seniors that must decide whether or not to buy food or medication, are veterans that served this country and are down on their luck, and children that will need this food due to school ending along with their breakfast and lunch programs.

     There is nothing more than I would like to see is a ton of food at the loading dock at each post office and until they transport the food, they cannot drop off the mail to the office! The USPS has not been to cooperative in this food drive, so I would like to show the USPS what the spirit of unionism is and shove the food up where the sun doesn’t shine!!! 

     If you would like to voluntary your time at the warehouse or see what it is like to be a part of this great undertaking you can go to 198 Grumman Road West, Bethpage, which is the location of the warehouse. You can also go to islandharvest.org to volunteer.     Again, I want to ‘thank you’ all for your support in this endeavor. Remember you are not doing this for me, the NALC, the USPS, or Island Harvest, you are doing this for your local community, which could be your customers, your family, your friend, or your neighbor. So,please participate and do your part delivering the cards and pick up the food on May 13th.