2013 Food Drive Helps 160 Families At Thanksgiving

As every year for the past several years, the DeAnza Lions Club committed to help local low-income families to have a festive Thanksgiving dinner, by organizing a food drive over the last weekend before the holidays and providing each family with 2 boxes of traditional Thanksgiving dinner ingredients.

Last weekend, many DeAnza Lions and their family members as well as LEOs from Cupertino, Monta Vista and DeAnza College teamed up on Saturday and Sunday to collect food and cash at 2 LUCKY store locations, while another team delivered the food collections to the Odd Fellows Lodge in Cupertino where yet another group started to sort food donations into pre-labelled and color-coded boxes.

Final packing started at 6:00am on Monday and 320 boxes were loaded by a dozen or so lions onto delivery trucks, while approx. 30 boxes with surplus food were already being delivered to Sunnyvale Community Services. By 9:00am a trek of 5 cars moved into the direction of the Support Network for Women while the big refrigerated truck with an even bigger amount of boxes went to Hughes Elementary.

Recipients this year also included families connected to Trace Elementary school, “Even Start Family Learning Center”, Domestic Violence Department, Young Parent Program FUHS and the Horizon Program.

The DeAnza Lions want to express their gratitude to Lucky’s Grocery stores in Santa Clara and San Jose, to the community, the fellow lions with families and friends as well as the LEOs of Monta Vista High, Cupertino High as well as DeAnza College for making our Annual Thanksgiving food drive this past weekend a big success.

Special thanks go to Santa Clara Store manager Jeff Kennedy, Asst. Mgr. Liz Coelho, and Head Checker Valerie Ruis, as well as to El Paseo Store manager Chris Miner, Tony Gonzalez, and Jessica Pusich for allowing us to have our drive at their respective location and for going above and beyond the call of duty – without them the event would not have happened.

The DeAnza lions also thank the Odd Fellows for donating the use of their meeting hall.

A big Thank You again to the patrons of the Lucky Stores for opening their heart and wallets to help people in need.