When I think of food banks, I think of donating canned goods at school drives, but I didn't realize how much more the Auburn Food Bank organizes and donates, and how much we do with them. As part of the humanitarian efforts of the Auburn Stake, we do organize food drives, such as the upcoming food drive on March 26th! (They are in need of specifically: peanut butter, diapers, canned goods, juice and mac 'n cheese)
However, we also put together hygiene kits; We cut up donated old towels for washcloths and gather travel size shampoos, conditioners, toothbrushes, toothpaste, body lotion and lip balm. One cool fact is that the LifeCenter Northwest (where we donate quilts for donors) helps us with our hygiene kits! As they travel around when organs are donated, they stay in hotels, and pick up their samples to donate to us for our hygiene kits! This is something quick and easy that anyone can do when they travel to help with our hygiene kits.
The food bank also needs pillows and sometimes quilts, so we make and stuff pillows (one of the activities to participate in on March 26th!), and occasionally donate some of our quilts to them.
The most interesting project to me is that we can make sleeping mats for the homeless for next to no cost, but lots of time! We ask for donations of used, clean plastic bags from shopping trips, cut them up, and tie them together to make sleeping mats! The result is amazing!
These are just a few images from google, but you get the idea of what they look like! I saw one of these completed sleeping mats at our humanitarian gathering last Tuesday, and it was amazing to see how simple grocery bags can come together to make something so useful!
So, from now on, we hope that you can pass along your old grocery bags! They go a long way! Come to our humanitarian project on March 26th to learn how to make these sleeping pads!
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