We've been asked after every hurricane, tornado, local fire, and whatever whether we are going to take care of the victims. Well, take a bow, because you just made it happen in a really big way. Here's the press release: Basic Needs Ministry Sends $1 million in Clothing to Disaster Sites Basic Needs Ministry, a public charity in Garner, with the help of a team led by Stephen Adams from NetAPP, RTP, packed and shipped nearly a million dollars worth of clothing to disaster sites. NetAPP supports community service projects chosen by their employees. The employees are given paid leave for their project time. Basic Needs only provides major disaster assistance when the assurance is given that the clothing is needed at a particular site, that there is a distribution team, and it will be distributed for free. In this case, the clothing will be handled by the well known MERCI disaster recovery center in Goldsboro, a project of the North Carolina Methodist Conference. Basic Needs through MERCI has been providing assistance to hurricane and earthquake zones for several years and MERCI handles the final container packing and direct shipping. This project started when residents living near the Wake-Johnston border, where I-40 meets NC 42, brought over 100,000 pounds of clothing to Basic Needs warehouse. Community volunteers donated thousands of hours sorting the donations to ensure they met the Department of State guidelines for humanitarian aid. The 70,000 pounds of clothing that did not meet its standards were sent to North Carolina based recycling companies, which returned several hundred dollars to buy food for the Cleveland Township Emergency Food Pantry at Basic Needs. NetAPP’s team brought in two trucks, loaded 20,000 pounds of clothing, and delivered it to MERCI’s warehouse in one day.
Stupid question Ron, Are you still accepting donated clothing? If so what are the rules and what do you need the most. We are doing the empty nest thing and have some pretty nice winter stuff we could drop off if needed. feel free to PM me or post - PJ
Basic Needs is accepting all types of clothing and sorting volunteers We need 28,000 clean clothing items for our display racks, when the local and churches send folks in for free clothing. They hold 30,000 gift certificates. We supply excess to farm worker ministries and disaster sites. We send bad quality clothes to an established North Carolina recycler and keep them out of the landfill. This is our first year with a 100% textile use or recycling program and we hope to buy $25,000 worth of food for the food pantry with the income from the recycling. Due to the library and houseware section expansion, we need more volunteers daily to keep up with the donations of textiles or we will have to send more directly to the recycler. We must send wet textiles to the landfill. Both are simply a matter of public safety.
Thanks for your ministry. I have a question in regards to a solication letter I received today from Basic Needs Ministry. The solicitation letter indicates: "Every dollar you donate today will provide $25.00 worth of food during the coming holiday season". Please explain how $1.00 buys $25.00 worth of food?
How we get $25 in food for every $1 we receive This may stretch you a little, but: When I go to the grocery stores, I keep walking past a lot of little expensive steaks. I would love to eat them, I just don't feel I should spend that much money. One offering that really looks good is the twin filet mignon (beef tenderloin) with the bacon wrap that sells for about $17.00 a package, which might be less than a pound. When that product passes its "sell by" date, the store will remove it from the case. Rather than put it in the dumpster, many Food Lion stores have a contract with the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina. The steaks are sent to the Bank's freezer and stored at -25 degrees. The food pantries drive up to the Food Bank and select our allocation of 130 pounds of raw meat a week and pay $.18 a pound handling charge, including the heavy box weight. In this example, the food pantry pays less than $.36 and gets product that was for sale at $17. This is more like $51 worth of food for $1. We don't have figures for this year, but at the end of 2007, we had provided food worth $400,000 and we sure didn't get anywhere near that much money donated. Every month we wory about whether we will be able to pay the warehouse costs and buy the food. I try to do the best, with whatever resources I can find, to provide needed services, which are not already being provided for our people. We receive some free food every week from four sources that also helps stretch our money. Of course, this figure is balanced by the canned beans and other heavy, but low dollar value foods we bring back.
Here are our food sources - about 120,000 pounds last year We bought and brought 3,000 pounds of food from the Food Bank on Monday (now that included a few hundred pounds of Johnston County's free federal TEFAP food), the Civitans delivered 20 turkey meals since last Thursday, we brought in a couple hundred pounds of food from the Food Shuttle on Friday, 250 loaves of bread arrived on Saturday morning, expect a few hundred pounds of turkey breast and other food this Thursday and Friday from the Shuttle, we pick up from a school drive on Friday, expect a friend to bring us more turkeys on Saturday moening, and hope our churches bring in their Saturday contributions, and it continues. I think it was last year that we provided food for 170,000 meals, just a ton or so every week. Some months we can pick up several hundreds of pounds of North Carolina General Assembly provided SNAP food. I can't remember getting any free food from the local grocery stores in 2008. This just requires money and shoppers/drivers and their vehicles every week! There were 50 pantries surrounding Cleveland, when we opened, so we limited access to Cleveland residents to try and ensure we could feed them with our limited resources. I hope this helps.
