Westside Ministries hands out tons of donated food to needy families in Turlock

Dozens of volunteers spent long hours over the past few days helping Westside Ministries repackage tons of donated food and distribute it to more than 2,200 needy people. But organizers say all the hard work is worth it.

“With all the food that’s produced in the Central Valley and this country, there are still children who go to sleep hungry,” said Sunshine Sakuda, communication director for Westside Ministries. “This is just a way to help a family get through the end of the month, or the end of the week.”

Dozen of vehicles lined up outside the Westside Ministries building at 950 Columbia Ave. in Turlock to receive donated boxes of food. The annual food giveaway was made possible by donations from the winter Fancy Food Show in San Francisco.

While the group has distributed donated food for the past several years, this is the third consecutive year the Fancy Food Show has donated food for the Turlock event.

The San Francisco food event is the largest specialty food and beverage show on the West Coast, exhibiting the latest products, producers and trends. And there’s always tons of food left over. Food that’s still good to serve and eat that would go to waste if it wasn’t donated to food banks.

The late winter Turlock giveaway has worked with donations from food banks in the past. And the San Francisco event had donated its leftovers to other charitable organizations. But the two events found each other in recent years and decided to work together, said Joe DiGrazia, who co-founded Westside Ministries with his wife, JoLynn DiGrazia.

As in previous years, Westside Ministries sent about 50 to 60 volunteers Tuesday to help clean up the San Francisco event by loading tons of boxed food onto trucks, Sakuda said. Joining the Westside Ministries volunteers were seniors from Turlock, Pitman and Hilmar high schools.

The high school seniors had to be 18 years old and ready to lift 20- to 30-pound boxes of food. A caravan of volunteers traveled to San Francisco, with Westside Ministries volunteers in their own vehicles and the students in school vehicles.

Drivers with trucks from Mid Valley Agricultural Services, Eric Cabral Trucking and Cal Valley Trucking hauled all the food to Turlock, where volunteers sorted out what could be distributed to needy families.

Turlock Fruit Co. provided the volunteers a space to sort and box the food. Sakuda said the volunteers worked like an assembly line, filling boxes with yogurts, cheeses and meats. Those items were housed at refrigerated storage sites until Sunday.

The volunteers also boxed bread, pickle jars, uncooked and packaged pastas and noodles, cookies, canned sauces, chips and crackers. Sakuda said Westside Ministries received most of the donations from the Fancy Food Show, and the Turlock group received about 2 1/2 truckloads more than it received last year from the San Francisco event.

Westside Ministries also donated a pallet loaded with boxes of food to United Samaritans, the Salvation Army and the Modesto Gospel Mission, organizations that help feed needy and homeless people in Stanislaus County.

NEW DISTRIBUTION PROCESS

On Sunday, about 40 to 50 volunteers formed two lines of vehicles entering the Westside Ministries property. They set up food stations between the two lines and handed boxes to people in the vehicles as they pulled up.

Sakuda said they created the two-line distribution process this year to hand out food more efficiently. The organizers also scheduled four giveaway service times throughout the morning, so families in their vehicles wouldn’t be waiting all morning in line to receive the boxes of food. Each family received a ticket for a scheduled time to pick up the food.

“The (food) stations worked so much smoother this year,” Sakuda said.

So much food was donated from the Fancy Food Show that Westside Ministries might still be handing out food donations to needy families later this week. Sakuda said they likely will be using some of the individually packaged snacks for the children in Westside Ministries’ summer dance program.

She said they’ll use some of the donated food that came in too-large quantities to redistribute to individual families to cook food for children and their parents participating in the organization’s after-school program Monday through Thursday.

“We’ve been blessed; we received so much food,” Sakuda said. “This is a way for us to let people in the community know who we are, where we are and what we’re all about.”

This story was originally published January 29, 2017 at 6:26 PM with the headline "Westside Ministries hands out tons of donated food to needy families in Turlock."