'Thanksgiving Blessing'

WASILLA — If you’re sitting on a big pile of canned food, now is a good time to donate it to your local food pantry.

The Valley has two such organizations, one in Wasilla at the Good Shepherd Lutheran Church on Bogard Road, the other in Palmer at the Salvation Army. Thanksgiving and the holidays in general are usually a time when the pantries can use all the help they can get.

And the Food Pantry of Wasilla will be the site of a special program for the first time this holiday season.

Called Thanksgiving Blessing, the idea is to have a one-day blitz of activity at the Wasilla site and at two more sites further north. Food will be distributed at the pantry on Bogard and at the Willow Community Center and Upper Susitna Senior’s Center from 1 to 6 p.m. on Nov. 20. Organizers say a similar program for Christmas is planned for the same three locations on Dec. 18.

Kay Peterson, who is heading up the effort, said that the whole thing came about through a group of churches.

“Most of us had already been doing food baskets through our congregations,” she said. “When Thanksgiving or Christmas came around we would always get calls saying, ‘I didn’t get on a list, I didn’t get a basket and I really need food.’”

So the churches decided to combine their efforts.

“It’s a huge endeavor that I’m not really sure I took into consideration when they asked me to be the chairperson for this,” Peterson laughed.

She said that in Wasilla there will be 50 to 60 people working throughout the day, manning the food bank but also taking families through to select their items, serving cookies and beverages to people waiting in line or bagging potatoes and apples.

She said they weren’t sure how many people to expect and sort came up with an estimate of maybe 800 people. But then the summer saw an up tick in demand at the food pantry.

“Usually in the summertime they see somewhat of a decrease because more people are working but they didn’t see that this year,” Peterson said.

So now volunteers are thinking 1,200 is more realistic. If there are more people than that, trucks full of food from the Food Bank of Alaska in Anchorage will be on hand to fill the need.

She said Willow expects 300 people and Talkeetna expects 200.

“This is a new endeavor and we expect that it will grow. We expect that next year we’ll probably end up doing two Wasilla sites,” she said.

And what does all this mean for the more fortunate and charitable among us? Peterson said that the operation has perishable foods — turkeys and whatnot — covered.

“The churches have collected money and donations to pay for things like turkeys and pies,” Peterson said.

But the plan is to use donations for the non-perishable stuff.

Which means they could use cranberry sauce, canned vegetables, gravy mix, sweet potatoes, yams, and stuffing mix. Donations can be brought to the Good Shepherd church.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.