Annual Food Drive at the Farmers Market Tomorrow

The fourth Annual Food drive at the H Street FRESHFARM Market is coming up & it's a great chance to do something nice for the holiday!

As you might recall, this food drive is different than most. The Market collects monetary donations that they spend with their farmers. All collected food goes to their gleaning partner, First Church, which is working with the Director of Community Services at Brookland Manor to identify families in need to receive baskets of fresh foods. People can also bring non-perishable items from home.

This year, First Church/Brookland Manor has requested 50 turkeys and the Market folks are working hard to fulfill this HUGE request. The point of doing the food drives this way is that it is a double benefit – it helps the hungry but also helps the farmers with a boost in sales. While they can certainly get turkeys for less, they do this in order to stay true to the organization and support their farmers (most of whom charge $4/lb).

They estimate that they need at least $3000 to purchase the requested birds. They’ve ordered 20 turkeys from Full Cellar Farm (who sells at H Street) and the past few weeks they’ve been collecting money from shoppers by having people buy a “feather” and decorate a cardboard “turkey” at the info stand. As of a week ago they had collected $1500, and had a pledge from Toki Underground (last year Erik Bruner-Yang gave $200). In order to get the best price, members of First Church and a Market rep are driving to the farm to get the turkeys on Monday, November 25th). However, they still need to collect a bunch more cash to get the remaining turkeys.

Toki's Erik Bruner-Yang will do a chef's demonstration tomorrow, & Frenchie's will do a cookie decorating demo. Prefer to donate online? Do it here. BTW, they do this drive at all of their markets each years, & I'm told that H Street typically raises almost as much money as the much larger Dupont market. Let's keep that up, shall we?