Community Response to the Roof Collapse

Over the past week we have seen an incredible out pouring of support from the community. We have seen very large contributions from corporations including $10,000 from both M & I Bank and Blue Cross/Shield. Individuals have also been extremely generous with donations from$10-20 to $10,000 from one donor.

I thought I would share the note pictured above that came in with a donation of $14.20. The father of this young man drove his son and his young daughter here to the food bank from Maricopa, Arizona so he could hand deliver his donation. They arrived about 4:45 PM on Friday afternoon. I took them on a tour and showed them the damaged area. Of course they were in awe of the size and scale of SMFB and really amazed at the giant refrigerator.

During the week I was trading emails with Dale Rich, one of St Mary’s Board members, who runs the Albertson’s distribution center in Toleson. He shared with me a similar roof collapse story he experienced at a distribution center he was running a number of years ago. I had also experienced a disaster of a different kind years ago when a 8 inch water line broke and flooded 10,000 square feet of office space and also went into the warehouse. I realized there are major differences between Dale’s and my previous experience and what occurred at St Mary’s this past week. While the mechanics of getting the facility back to an operational level are the same, in the corporate world the pressure is to get back on line because you are losing money by not operating and you have opened the door to competition. For the food bank, it was recognizing that everyday we did not operate meant that 100,000 meals worth of food did not make its way into the community. The major upside that you don’t see in the corporate world that we had all week long was seeing the response from the community. We had countless calls offering assistance of all kinds including construction, transportation, storage, clean up help and major food donations. That is the part that lifted the spirits of the staff when we hit a low point…..knowing the community is behind us is an incredible feeling. Then having the young man who wrote the attached letter come in at the end of the day on Friday……I couldn’t help but walk out the door with a smile on my face knowing we were in good shape and had come a long way since Tuesday night at 11:00 PM.