Person-to-Person is asking Wilton residents for their help this Saturday, May 9 to “Stamp Out Hunger.” They are the recipients of the Wilton and Norwalk mail carriers efforts as part of the annual National Association of Letter Carriers’ Food Drive.
Wilton letter carriers will be delivering grocery bags to all postal customers this week, and residents are encouraged to fill the bags with groceries and leave them at their mailboxes on Saturday or drop it off at the local Post Office (15 Hubbard Rd.).
Person-to-Person (P2P) is a volunteer-driven agency that provides low-income individuals and families living in Lower Fairfield County with basic emergency services, and offers clients a food back among other resources. The service area includes Darien, New Canaan, Norwalk, Stamford, Weston, Westport and Wilton.
According to P2P’s Norwalk site manager Callie Jayne, because this event is the agency’s largest food drive each year, there’s a good deal of preparation and coordination. Volunteers have been spending hours stapling the suggested shopping list of non-perishable foods to 7,200 brown paper grocery bags for the mail carriers to deliver to Wilton residents.
There will be many Wilton volunteers helping too.
“We’ve made arrangements for at least 150 Wilton High School freshmen to volunteer on the day of the drive,” Jayne says. “Some of the students will be stationed at the Wilton Post Office to offload donations from the postal trucks as they arrive and transfer them to the P2P box truck for transport. Other students will be stationed at the South Norwalk Community Center to receive and sort food donations from Norwalk and Wilton.”
The South Norwalk Community Center is allowing P2P to use their facility as a staging area over the weekend. On Monday, two hundred volunteers from Pepperidge Farm will not only sort and inventory the donations but will also help transport the food back to the Norwalk site. “Working to reduce food insecurity in Norwalk and surrounding communities is a challenge best met with the help of others; so we are grateful for the collaborative assistance of Pepperidge Farm and SoNo Community Center,” Jayne adds.
The need, she adds, is high.
“More than 9-percent of people in Norwalk are living in poverty, but there’s also poverty in Weston (2.7-percent), Westport (3.7-percent) and Wilton (2.5-percent). Hunger and food insecurity is an issue that many in our communities are dealing with.”
Each week, more than 150 individuals and families shop at P2P’s Norwalk pantry for enough food to prepare three meals a day for seven days. “At P2P we think that no one in Fairfield County should have to be hungry,” Jayne says, “and donations to this Food Drive will help to ensure that people in our community won’t be.”