More than 15 of Atlanta’s favorite food trucks, an extensive arts and crafts market and live music by Second Hand Swagger and the Mike Veal Band brought the community together for the first Taste of The Trucks event on Nov. 12 at The Concourse in Sandy Springs.
Not just any food truck festival, the family-fun event helped raise awareness and funds to fight hunger in metro Atlanta by supporting Second Helpings Atlanta, a non-profit food rescue organization whose mission is to drive out hunger and reduce food waste in the metropolitan Atlanta area by rescuing surplus food and delivering it to those in need.
“Nearly 20 percent of people living in Atlanta live in a food insecure environment, meaning they’re not quite sure where or when their next meal might be,” said Joe Labriola, executive director SHA. “We focus on reducing hunger in the metro Atlanta area by rescuing nutritious surplus food and delivering it to partner agencies that feed the hungry on a daily basis.”
Moreso, the nonprofit is focused on identifying sources of and introducing nutritious, perishable food into the diets of people that survive mainly on diets consisting of highly processed food.
“On average, a food insecure family of four skips approximately 100 meals per month and purchases the least expensive food possible in order to have enough food to feed the family,” added Labriola.
At Taste of The Trucks, SHA hoped to raise levels of awareness for the work and its impact in the community, raise funds to fuel the expansion of its operations to make a bigger impact in the future and recruit new volunteers to help expand its operations.
SHA serves as the link between its network of 63 food donors and the 32 partner agencies who feed the hungry daily. To achieve this, SHA uses help of volunteer drivers who rescue food from the donors and transport it to one of its partner agencies. The nonprofit continues to seek more people to support its efforts.
Volunteers can sign up for a route where they will pick up and deliver nutritious, perishable food. The nonprofit is also looking for people with skills in the area of grant research and writing, IT, marketing and PR, event planning and administrative/clerical assistance.
“We are feeding over 3,500 people per day, and it is because of our amazing volunteers,” he said. “They are making a difference in the lives of thousands of their neighbors.”
Since its first food pick-up in 2004, SHA has collected and distributed nearly 5.7 million pounds of food, enough to provide over 4.6 million meals. SHA started as a social action project at Temple Sinai in Sandy Springs in 2004 and became a nonprofit in 2012.
In other news: DeVore & Johnson, a Georgia-based plumbing wholesaler, partnered with Viega, a manufacturer of plumbing, heating, gas, drinking water products and pipe connection technology, and raised over $23,050 to bring holiday cheer to deployed troops through the Adopt-A-Platoon Holiday Project fundraising campaign. The proceeds went toward sending platoons overseas packages from home and they raised enough funds to donate over 600 care packages to deployed troops this holiday season.
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