As part of our Factory Week we spent an afternoon volunteering at Gleaner’s Food Bank. Over 260,000 people in Indiana are receiving food assistance from Gleaner’s. According to gleaners.org, “That’s 1 in 8 Hoosiers in our 21-county service area in central and southeast Indiana.” And almost half of those receiving assistance from Gleaner’s are children and seniors.
The team at Gleaner’s does a great job of providing a welcoming, friendly and clean environment for volunteers that creates an experience worthwhile for both the organization and the volunteer. A few of us are even planning to go back, as the environment was fun and the work rewarding. Our team worked to intake and do a first-pass sorting of items donated by a large grocery chain.
The manual labor of the warehouse was a nice break from the strategic thinking and digital making we’d been doing on our internal projects during the week.
Plus Dustin had fun making robots out of the banana boxes.
At the end of our 2.5 hours on the warehouse floor, our host shared that our ten person team (five of us, plus three from another volunteer group, and two hosts) processed over 2,800 pounds of food, which would fulfill more than 1,800 meals for Indiana kids, seniors, and families in need.
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