From mid-morning into the evening on the second Saturday in May every year, Sheboygan County Food Bank’s warehouse is a bustling scene of helping hands working together to organize Stamp Out Hunger food donations like a well-oiled machine. Pairs of volunteers pull up in their cars into our drive-through garage. Their trunks and back seats are stuffed with bags of assorted non-perishable foods that they picked up from thoughtful residents who set them out near their mailboxes earlier that morning. Two of our trucks take turns delivering wheeled-mail-sorting-baskets temporarily piled with food donations that were collected by mail carriers and dropped off at the Sheboygan post office. Volunteers flock to the cars and trucks to corral the incoming donations into the center of our warehouse, keeping up with sorting hard and heavy container items from lighter items and then placing them into big cardboard boxes.
The National Association of Letter Carriers’ largest single-day food drive (31-year and counting!) is set to take place on Saturday, May 11 this year. It’s coordinated by post offices in partnership with food banks nationwide and gives residents the chance to be a part of supporting local families struggling with hunger. Mail carriers work double-duty on the big day by collecting donations set out by residents’ mailboxes while they’re out delivering mail on their assigned routes. Sheboygan County Food Bank receives donations from Sheboygan, Howards Grove, and Kohler, which helps supply nearly 40 partner organizations and our Sheboygan Cares Food Pantry and Herb Kohler & Natalie Black Community Cafe during the summer months.
Stamp Out Hunger is our second biggest community-wide partnership food drive of the year and its success is especially important right now. Our latest data reveals that inflation and the cutbacks in government benefits are continuing to make it hard for more and more of our neighbors to feed their families. We’re already serving an average of over 6,400 families each month in the first three months of 2024 through food pantries and our other partner organizations. This is an 18% increase from 2023, a 49% increase from 2022, a 69% from 2021, and exactly on track with how many of our neighbors counted on us during the height of the pandemic in 2020.
Sign Up to Volunteer
We couldn’t be a part of the largest single-day food drive without the dedicated help of nearly 100 volunteers who fill two to four hour-long shifts throughout the day. See more details and sign up to volunteer.
Donate Food
Cereal, oatmeal, peanut butter, canned soup, canned tuna, canned chicken, canned fruit, and personal care items are our current most needed donations. Picking up these items on an upcoming grocery trip helps us avoid collecting expired items. Then before your mail carrier’s arrival on May 11, place the donations in a bag next to your mailbox. Mail carriers and our volunteers work together to make sure all donations get to our warehouse safely so that we can continue to be there for our neighbors in need.
