Apogee Volunteers at Local Food Bank
On April 24, 2008 a sizable army of Apogeeans – the Apogee Army of Altruism –set off for the southern most tip of Austin to volunteer at the Capital Area Food Bank of Texas (CAFB).
The eighteen or so of us arrived at CAFB and made our way to the holding area to sign in and place name tags on our chests. With that difficult part of the volunteering experience out of the way our guide and host Xavier gave an overview of CAFB’s operations. Brief overview: the Food Bank is, in essence, a distribution center. Food is not handed out on-site, but rather local charities and non-profit groups place food orders, drive to CAFB in trucks, cars and trailers, pick up their orders and then provide the direct service of feeding Central Texans from their charity or non-profit organization.
It’s time to head to the Product Recovery Room. We walk through two sets of doors and into a 60,000 square foot warehouse. The ceilings live way up in the sky. It holds approximately 1.5 million pounds of food – the CAFB ships around 2.5 million pounds per month. Finally, we reach two massive swinging doors that lead to the chilly Product Recovery. We’re ushered to the back corner of the recovery room. Look up. There’s a large instruction guide hanging from the wall. It contains all of the dos and don’ts – clean all cans and pass them down the conveyor belt, check adult and baby formula for specific date guidelines, et cetera – feel free to sing along with the radio blaring in the other corner.
After a bit of a rocky start, everyone got the hang of it and we soon started cleaning, categorizing, caching the food into boxes and stacking for delivery at The Flash speed. By the time Xavier told us students to put our pencil down, we had managed to process 10,276 pounds of food that equals 8,220 meals. Hopefully, we’ll surpass that benchmark on our next trip to the Capital Area Food Bank of Texas!
