The John S. Mulholland Family Foundation’s 2nd Annual Summer in the City Campaign was a tremendous success — with 56,531 of food collected and 1,910 pounds of fresh produce, milk and eggs, meat and poultry purchased and delivered. These results are more than triple last year’s results!
Seventeen suburban parishes participated — Blessed Sacrament and St. Thomas Apostle in Washington, DC; St. Mary’s. St. Elizabeth’s and St Patrick’s in Rockville; Resurrection, Burtonsville; Holy Cross, Garrett Park; St. Michael the Archangel, Silver Spring; St. Paul’s, Damascus; St. Francis Assisi, Derwood; St. Nicholas, Laurel; Our Lady of Mercy; Potomac; St. Peter’s, Olney; Holy Redeemer, Kensington; St. Mary’s, Barnesville; St. John Neumann, Germantown; St. Jerome, Hyattsville.
Part of this drive included a “Walk with Francis” with five of the above parishes contributing 18,650 cans one day prior to the arrival of the Holy Father in Washington.
To be sure, 56,531 cans of food is a lot, and it helped our three pantries make it through the summer, when very few organizations are conducting food drives like ours. But if we make it look easy, it is not! There are hundreds of folks who make this possible — teams of volunteers at each of the donating churches who coordinate the drive and their pastors and office staff who arrange bulletin and pulpit announcements, and the ushers at Mass who are so vital; the volunteers who load the trucks and drive them to the inner city; the pantry volunteers who unload the trucks, sort and shelve the donations, and ready the bags for the clients; our friends at Safeway, Giant, and Whole Foods, who donate shopping bags; our friends at St. Peter’s Olney who often lend us their really big truck for our larger hauls; and those who elect to help us with monetary donations, which this year was $2.250.
With the monetary donations, we purchased our regular milk and eggs, meat and poultry (thousands upon thousands of hot dogs for the summertime!) and made regular trips to visit Larry Donnelly, pictured here, in Southern Maryland for carloads (over 500 ears of corn per trip) of the most delicious summer corn on the cob you can imagine!
Did our clients have a great summer? We certainly hope so and thanks to our donors and supporters, the participating churches, the scores of volunteers, and the thousands of folks who each brought a can of food with them to church on Sunday.