Imagine That!

Never Too Young

Who would have believed that a bunch of elementary school students could feed more than 75 families for Thanksgiving! Not only did they help us provide Thanksgiving dinners, but food to feed families for 4 to 5 days!

Their food drive collected over 1500 pounds of canned fruits and vegetables, cereal, tuna, peanut butter, macaroni and cheese, oatmeal, soup, beans, rice and so much more. These items were used to pack boxes with complete meals to feed families for several days. With their help we were also able to distribute complete Thanksgiving dinners with stuffing, mashed potatoes, yams, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, green beans, and turkey or turkey breasts. THANK YOU Imgine School at Lakewood Ranch!

A Learning Community Becomes A Giving Community

The food pantry at The Church at Braden River serves between 40 and 60 families each week for a total of well over 500 people each months. We work in partnership with The Food Bank of Meals on Wheels Plus of Manatee County who is our primary supplier of food. They handle the food collected by mail carriers at Memorial Day and by Publix at the holidays and they distribute the USDA foods as well. USDA foods are farm products that the government buys in order to help farmers stay profitable and productive and then they send them to feeding programs like ours to help people who cannot buy enough food.

Right now, with a lot of people out of work, there are many families that don't always have enough money for rent, electricity, water and food. We don't have money to help them with other things, but we can help them with food. That means in the past few months, as more and more people are having trouble paying the bills, more are coming to us for food. This makes it harder for us to get enough food to provide meals for everyone who comes to us. Sometimes, we have even had to tell people that we didn't have food for them. The food Imagine students collected at their food drive was enough for almost 2 weeks of food distribution. Imagine that!