And so it begins

    We’re excited to announce that the Pickering Cares Community Food Drive has officially begun! New to the food drive this year is the donation bag. Thanks to the Pickering Town Centre and News Advertiser, a donation bag will be delivered with the News Advertiser on May 3^rd, to approximately 23,000 households in Pickering. We are asking residents to place food items in the bags and then place their front porch – by 9am. In order to ensure a successful pick-up from our volunteers, we ask that you place the bags in an area visible from the street.

    If you don’t get a copy of the News Advertiser, donation bags will also be distributed by our Youth Volunteer groups at the Pickering Town Centre on Saturday, May 5^th starting at 11am.

    Please be aware if you live in an apartment building or condo, or on a rural road, donations can be made directly at the Pickering Town Centre, by Zellers, or at any Fire Hall in Pickering from May 4^th through to the 19^th. 

Our 2012 Food Drive Announcement

    We are pleased to announce our 3rd annual door-to-door food drive. On May 12th our volunteers will again visit the houses in urban Pickering and collect their donations. But here is the change. Instead of delivering a flyer (door knocker) to each house, we will be distributing brown paper bags with collection instructions on them via the News Advertiser. Our youth volunteers will also hand out bags at the Pickering Town Centre the weekend before the door-to-door drive.

    Keep coming back to check our updates. We will give more detailed instructions in a few weeks. Thanks for your ongoing support.

Exciting new Partnership

We are going to be part of the new Farmer's Market at Pickering Town Centre on Tuesday afternoons. We will provide more details soon. Opening is July 26th @ 2pm. Our hope and prayer is that our food banks will gather a huge harvest as a result. Pickering real does care!

2011 Food Drive

Monday night, May 30th is our final part of Pickering Cares 2011 Food Drive. Our partners and team leaders will meet to celebrate and feed back our 2011 drive. We will receive our final numbers from the results. I can tell you that even though many of the target items weighed less than last year, we still exceeded 5 tons of food. We have heard from both food banks what a timely and significant impact this year's drive has been. Good job Pickering. You really do care!!

Please note that even though we try to ensure that every house receives a flyer and every house that has food put out on the pick up day, gets their food picked up, we have less than perfect execution. this year we missed at least 25 homes and will continue to work on getting better at this. If we missed you, please accept our apologies. If you haven't let us know yet, please drop us an email at pickeringcares@gmail.com

A big, huge thanks to the over 300 volunteers that made this possible. If you want to volunteer next year please drop us a note at pickeringcaresvolunteer@gmail.com

Thank you

Last Week of 2011 Food Drive Project

   This is it folks. We have gathered up the last few flyers and are delivering them today and tomorrow. The Pickering News Advertiser is printing an article about the drive either tomorrow or Thursday. He is a link: http://www.durhamregion.com/news/article/176825

   We have rented the trucks, obtained lots of boxes, organized the sorting tables and are ready to go. We start collecting Saturday morning at 9:30 AM

   If you have helped this year, please accept our thanks. If you are one of the thousands that will put our non-perishable food, we are truly grateful. Your generosity will make a huge difference to families in our community this summer.

   We will report the final totals as soon as the tallies are complete.

Pickering Cares 2011 - The last 12 days

   All the planning and preparing now shifts into volunteers carrying out the two major tasks:
       1. Deliver a Door Handle Flyer to the 25,000 single family homes in Pickering that are south of Finch
       2. Come back May 14th and pick up the food that people put out for the food banks.

   We at Pickering Cares have again been amazed by the cooperation of the community. There are 7 of the churches, scouts pathfinders, youth groups and community volunteers making a contribution this year. We trust that by Saturday night, May 7th, all the flyers will have been delivered.

    Then Saturday, May 14th, we need everybody possible to help us collect, sort, pack and deliver the approximately 10 tons of food the citizens of Pickering will donate. Here are the details:

     Amberlea Presbyterian Church - 1820 Whites Road - 9AM

     We need drivers and runners. We will have certificates available for High School Volunteer Hours.

      When many hands work together we can accomplish much and make a huge difference to those families that need it the most this summer.

      Thank you in advance for your help.

This Week @ Pickering Cares April 14th

    Activity in our teams continues to grow each week. It is exciting to see each step of the project unfold. Our flyers have been ordered from the printer. Our labels are prepared for each of the boxes we will pack after the food is sorted. Snacks and coffee for our team meetings and events are in the works. Now we need to tell everyone in Pickering about the Food Drive and the opportunity to join in the fun as a volunteer. Even though churches and scouting groups partner with us, and even though we attracted neighbourhood volunteers and families of volunteers, this year we are going to 10,000 more houses and we need all hands on deck.

    So check our schedule and send us an email and we will make sure you can share in both making a real difference in our community and having some fun.

Email us with questions or to volunteer: PickeringCaresVolunteer@gmail.com

Volunteer Hours Certificates for HIgh School Kids available for all events on schedule.