Health & Fitness
Area Letter Carriers Deliver for Charity
National Stamp Out Hunger food drive, conducted by letter carriers union, is a big hit in La Verne and Claremont.
Post offices throughout the country, including those in the East San Gabriel Valley, were hubs of activity Saturday as part of the 21th annual Stamp Out Hunger food drive, the largest one-day event of its kind in the country.
The La Verne Post Office was no exception, as one mail truck after another arrived in the late afternoon loaded with canned goods and other nonperishable groceries that customers had put into paper bags.
Postal workers on the dock unloaded the mail trucks and filled dozens and dozens of big bens. The donated goods were then loaded into bobtail trucks by volunteers for distribution to local food pantries.
The drive is organized by the National Association of Letter Carriers union. Last year, more than 70 million pounds of food was collected nationally, bringing the total to 1.2 billion pounds since the drive’s inception. With 1,400 branches involved nationally, that figures out to 50,000 pounds per post office. At the La Verne branch, it appeared to be more than that.
Anita Guzik, the Stamp Out Hunger food coordinator for Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley, said expectations we high for this year’s drive. “For the first time paper bags were put in mail boxes in most areas, which, for one thing, draws more attention to the drive than just a postcard and a plastic bag.”
One of the beneficiaries of the drive that covered La Verne and Claremont was Sowing Seeds for Life, a La Verne-based pantry which provides food and services to some 6,000 people per month.
“It’s just amazing how much food is collected,” said Glendora resident Vicki Brown, the founder and CEO of Sowing Seeds for Life, as she personally helped fill one of the bobtail trucks. “It shows just how generous people can be and also shows what good people our letter carriers are. Tony Mazuca and his wife Linda deserve a lot of credit as the organizers of the drive in La Verne and Claremont.”
National sponsors included Campbell Soups, Valpak envelopes, the U.S. Postal Service, United Way, the AFL-CIO, Feeding America, Uncle Bob’s Self-Storage and AARP.