The Okotoks Food Bank received a substantial boost recently after one of their biggest annual food drives.

Bags were distributed to the doors of Okotoks and area residents to be filled and picked up by volunteers from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on September 28th.

The flood of donations is particularly helpful at this time of year, which usually proves to be a lot slower for the food bank.

This was the first such food drive for Executive Director Pamela McLean, who joined the food bank earlier this year; though she says it went rather smoothly.

"You can understand my trepidation, never having seen this in action before, but you just let it go and trust that all these volunteers know what they're doing, because they do. It was wonderfully chaotic there for a few hours."

She says the two biggest hurdles came in the weeks leading up to the food drive, with the date having to be pushed forward two weeks due to an event at the church, as well as a forecast calling for snowfall.

"Most people know that this major food drive happens on the second Saturday of September. We did receive a couple of phone calls asking if we were going to do a food drive. We were a little concerned that we would lose momentum, that we would lose some interest. Our biggest concern was that there would be a weather event. As it was, there was enough snow to cause a little bit of interference. Some of the bags were wet as they were delivered but snowfall was at a bit of a minimum there, so I'm grateful for that."

Thankfully, the major snowfall didn't happen until the next day, and those road bumps weren't enough to outright ruin the event.

According to McLean, some residents notified the food bank about having been missed, to which she apologized, encouraging those residents to drop their donations off at one of the many drop-off points across town.

The food bank received an estimated 19,600lbs of food donations, though McLean says more donations are trickling in.

"We had to have a cutoff point, otherwise we could be adding to that number until December! We know that people wanted to know the result of that particular major food drive so we chose an arbitrary cutoff date, so that is our number. Our shelves look happy and full again."

McLean says there are multiple groups to thank, with youth group volunteers distributing approximately 10,000 bags, church members collecting filled bags, Safeway donating shopping carts to transport food, food bank volunteers sorting donated items at the church, and local business owner Doug Lacey, who donated four cube trucks to transport the donations to the food bank, to name a few.

With several more events planned in the coming months, and the holiday season always providing a boost in donations, McLean says she doesn't foresee the need to place a bulk order any time soon.

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