The Mega-Glean!

Post by BFC intern Vicky Gan.


This Saturday, August 7th, Bread for the City will send out our largest Glean for the City expedition yet. This time, we will be partnering with Miriam’s Kitchen, which provides hot meals and case management services to homeless men and women. 35 dedicated Bread for the City volunteers will be joined by 15 Miriam’s Kitchen volunteers. We’ll drive to Parker Farms with a fleet of vehicles that will bring back almost 4,000 pounds of sweet corn.

This is our second season of Glean for the City, and our first collaborative glean. We expect to pack both of our pantries pretty much to capacity. Miriam’s Kitchen, which has recently begun serving dinner in addition to breakfast, will be using the sweet corn to make corn salad, corn soup, and good ol’ corn on the cob.

The organization’s development and volunteer manager, Ashley Lawson, has this to say about the upcoming event:
We very rarely have full ears of corn to serve our guests, so we are very excited to spend the day picking enough corn so each Miriam’s guest can get their fill of corn for dinner next week. Our volunteers are looking forward to this unique afternoon, and we are grateful to Parker Farms for being so generous with their crop. Even more so, we are appreciative to Bread for the City for the invitation to collaborate. We hope this is the start of many gleaning days!
We’ll also be sharing some of our glean with the DCPCA’s Ward 8 ‘Family Fun Day’ on August 14, 2010. The event will be from 11AM to 3PM at Ketcham Elementary School (1919 15th Street SE), and will offer food (corn and more!), exercise and fun activities with live music and local vendors providing tips and information on healthy living. (Contact Emily Roberts at (202) 638‐0252, x220.)

If you’re interested in volunteering, or if your community group or organization might want to partner with us on future mega-gleans, please email Vince Hill. In the meantime, if you'd like to support this work, you can help us cover the cost of transportation and other things like bins, bags, gloves, and so on, by making a donation to Glean for the City today.