As part of Hunger Action Week, United Way is raising money for a cool project that will save food that normally would go to waste, bring more food to the emergency food system, and leverage tons more money than the project actually costs.

The project is called Yes We Can!

Here’s the basic concept: a local cannery in South King County will donate the facilities two days a week for local emergency food providers. With this time, we will take excess foods that would normally be wasted and can them, thus giving them a longer shelf life! When the canning is fully ramped up, we can expect them to pump out 10,000 – 14,000 cans a week! These cans will then be distributed to area food banks.

You might be thinking to yourself, “how can there be wasted food at food banks?”  The truth is that while most of the food going into the system is distributed, there are a number of situations where food might not get to the people.  Here are a few scenarios

• If a large quantity of fresh produce gets donated, by the time the food is split up and taken to the food banks, they’ll have such a short shelf life that they’ll go bad before people can eat them.
• Food banks have limited space in the freezers.  If there are many frozen vegetables, they literally can’t fit it in their small facilities.
• Food bank clients also have limited space in their home freezers. Even if they wanted to, many times clients can’t taken in as many frozen items as they’d like.

By canning these goods, food banks can store more of it and clients can bring more home!

While all of this is enough for it to be a great project, what makes it even better is that your donations will leverage a ton of in-kind donations!  The money we raise will go to paying for staff, training, food transportation, and other operation costs.  By paying for that, the cannery will donate their space, labels, and cans to the project.  That is around $200,000 worth of donations!

This project is exactly what United Way loves.  It is a collaboration with us, Northwest Harvest, the LDS Cannery, Rotary First harvest, and the South King County Food Coalition.  It’s strategic and has a huge impact in our community.

You can be a part of this project, too.  Donate to United Way to make this all happen!  Your donations will help less food be wasted and more food going to families that need it!  Can we come together as a community to make this awesome project come to fruition? YES WE CAN!

Donate Here