The Crawford’s Auto Repair 6th Annual Holiday Food Drive 2024 has begun! Every year we team up with United Food Bank to raise food and funds to help feed the hungry in Arizona. 1 in 10 People, 1 in 7 kids, and 1 in 14 seniors suffer from food insecurity. These are families and neighbors within our community and we are doing our best to help them have a great holiday season. The food drive will run from November 1 to December 14 this year.
We’ve made it super easy to participate with the following options:
1. Donate funds directly to United Food Bank through our team’s fundraising portal. We don’t touch this money and it is processed securely through United Food Bank’s secure checkout. For every $1 donated United Food Bank can provide 5 meals. Their purchasing power is greater than the average individual or family since they have arrangements with local food sources and they buy it in bulk. This is the most efficient way to donate. The option to donate anonymously is available if you don’t want your name posted online and/or you don’t want to receive follow-up promotions. Donate through the secure portal.
2. Join Our Fundraising Team – Once you see our fundraising portal, you’ll notice that you also have the opportunity to join our team. Joining our team means you can be part of the fundraising efforts by sharing the portal on social media and even creating individual goals for funds raised through your efforts. You can join us as an individual, family, organization, or business.
3. Bring non-perishable food to the shop. This is a great way to cycle through non-perishable food items in your pantry and it’s a much-appreciated alternative to fund donations. We will make sure that any food brought to the shop or collected through neighborhood drives will get to United Food Bank and we will report on the grand total of meals provided. See the most needed items below.
4. Participate in neighborhood food drives. We will perform neighborhood food drives in various neighborhoods which involve leaving an empty paper grocery bag on the doorsteps of homes and collecting them back a few days later. If you live in these neighborhoods, filling the bag (or multiple bags) and leaving it on your porch at the designated time would be a convenient way to help. If you choose not to donate, then leaving the empty bag on the porch would also be helpful since we save them for future food drives and they are actually hard to come by.
Most needed items:
- Funds – again for every $1 United Food Bank can provide 5 meals
- Cereals and Oatmeal
- Chilis, Soups, and Stews
- Canned Tuna or Chicken
- Peanut Butter
- Beans
- Canned Vegetables and Fruit
- Canned or Dried Milk
- Canned Tomato Products
- Rice and Pasta
Please no glass jars, baby food or opened food.
Donate Food or Funds In-Store For An Auto Repair Discount
Bring 5 cans or more to the shop, or donate $5 or more through the secure portal, and get a $5 discount on auto repair. $5 may not seem like a lot, but those funds actually equal 25 meals which United Food Bank can provide to the hungry. We made the dollar amounts the same to make it an easy choice. The option to donate anonymously is available if you don’t want your name posted online and/or you don’t want to receive follow-up promotions. It cannot be combined with other Crawford’s promotional offers. Follow us on social media or see our ads elsewhere for additional offers.
The oneLESS Car Show & Food Drive hosted by United Food Bank
As part of our Annual Food Drive, we participated in the oneLESS Car Show & Food Drive hosted by United Food Bank on November 16. Two of our technicians had custom cars on display.
The Crawford’s Auto Repair team at the oneLESS Car Show & Food Drive. The car on the left is Connor’s custom Ford Mustang.
Tommy with his custom Chevy Camaro, 307 Chassis with 350 engine.
Special Thank You’s
Special Thank You all who participated in the car show.
Special Thank You to Safeway on Alma School and Guadalupe for donating the paper bags which we used for the neighborhood food collections.
Special Thank You to Staples on Gilbert and Germann for flyer donation.
Special Thank You to neighbors in the Marlborough neighborhood for your generous donations.
Special Thank You to Frye Rd neighbors in Monterey Vista, Monterey II and Heatherplace for your generous donations.
Special Thank You to the neighbors who tracked us down, brought food to the shop or called us for another pickup when we missed their houses during the neighborhood drive-throughs. We are blessed to be part of a community where good people are dedicated to doing good things.
Special Thank You to our staff members, friends and family who participated. You definitely lightened the load this year.
Results
Car Show funds donations: $1,375, which is 6,875 meals
Car Show food donations: 17 lbs, which is 14 meals
Marlborough Food Donations: 244 lbs, which is 203 meals
Frye Rd Neighbors Food Donation: 568 lbs, which is 473 meals
Funds donations through online portal: $75, which is 375 meals
Total meals donated: 7,940 (Plus whatever is donated through the online portal up until Christmas. The portal is still live).
This year we tripled the number of meals donated, which was mostly due to our participation in the car show. The food donations from the neighborhood drive-throughs was significantly down this year and we might have a couple of possible explanations for that:
We hired a flyer placement company that may not have placed the flyers very strategically. We’ve seen evidence that the flyers between neighborhoods might have been mixed up. So neighbors in Marlborough might not have felt as confident in the food drive while reading the flyer for Frye Rd Neighbors or vice versa. The flyer placement company would not confirm that the flyers were placed on one of the days we requested when the days we requested were meant to give neighbors adequate time to decide if they were participating without being so far off that they might forget about it, because life happens. We saw multiple houses which had more than one flyer and when collecting the food we had abnormally long sequences of houses without donations – this suggests that they did not leave flyers at every house. We also saw multiple houses where the flyers were face down, which essentially meant that the residents of the home would have seen the back side of a blank brown paper bag and had no indication that it was actually part of a food drive. We will be placing the flyers ourselves next year.
The flyers were half page instead of full page this year, which is less appealing. Half page is what we had available with the flyer printing donation. Even with the donation we had to pay for additional flyers.
The flyers indicated that the paper bags were donated by Safeway but they all had the name “Albertsons” printed on them. Since the flyers were printed at a separate time from when the bags were received we did not have an effective way of communicating that it was probably because of the Safeway-Albersons merger. The inconsistent information on the flyer could have contributed to a lack of confidence for some neighbors.
It was hinted to us that Marlborough might have had another food drive at the same time, so if many of the neighbors contributed to that first then we would not have seen the results, though we still give a virtual high-five to them for their efforts if that is the case, as we do all charitable activity during the holidays and throughout the year.
We normally do the neighborhood drive-throughs the week after Thanksgiving, or the first week of December. This year we did it two weeks after Thanksgiving and for some reason that may not have been good timing for a lot of neighbors.
It is possible that there are other factors, such as times may be tough for more neighbors this year, maybe there are more-than-usual move-outs and new move-ins so not as many were familiar with the event, or simply less neighbors are interested in participating. This is the 6th year we’ve done this food drive and we hope to keep doing it every year, though we are certainly not doing it to put undue pressure on any of our neighbors; we do it to help those in need during the holidays so that they can have happy holidays, the same as we wish for everyone. We are open to feedback from residents of participating neighborhoods. All the feedback have received so far has been very positive from what we perceive as a caring and giving community that we are proud to be part of. These explanations are in no way intended to belittle the donations received. We express our gratitude, United Food Bank has expressed their gratitude, and unseen is the gratitude of those who ultimately receive these donations.