December 2023

Year-to-date stats:

Delivery: 3,558 Households/13,894 Individuals | Express Pickup: 1,526 Households/6,472 Individuals

Market Shoppers: 14,335 Households/59,304 Individuals | Diapers: 1,297

"Setting our sights on 2024"

A NEW YEAR, SAME NEEDS

As 2023 comes to a close, we reflect on an amazing year at Hope Creek. The Christmas give we had last week was phenomenal, serving 450+ families food staples, baked goods, Christmas hams and plenty of extras. The holidays are always a huge blessing for us as we see an uptick in volunteers and donations. Northshore

Community Church in Kirkland brought 25 volunteers the first Saturday in December and crushed our project list! We've also had almost every volunteer shift in December full or oversubscribed, putting us way ahead in weighing, sorting and packing through the holidays. Don't forget that we need both volunteers and donations, all throughout the year.

The Jackson High School food drive brought in over five tons of non-perishable foods, stocking our shelves and containers for the next few months, for sure. We also had two Jackson students put on a book drive for the food bank customers, distributing over 1,500 books to families before Christmas. We also had a huge personal items and toiletry drive put on by Valley View Middle School, allowing us to bless our customers with 1,500 necessary stocking stuffers.

We received donations from the Mill Creek Rotary, South County Fire and so many individuals and families from the community and beyond. We also won a $4,000 grant from the Rick Steves fund for a new volunteer management system so we can upgrade from our spiral bound notebook!

Reaching More Students

Backpacks for Hope will start 2024 with 3 new schools, in addition to the 21 we served in the first half of this school year. We will be providing over 800 students with 7 nutritious and easy to assemble meals each weekend, and probably more before the end of the year. Everett School District is building a family resource center at Silver Lake Elementary, which they are generously offering us part for storage and distribution of food for backpacks. Our logistic capacity for backpacks is 1,000 per week with our current setup and the Silver Lake Family Resource center helps add to that for when we get there.

2023 Donations and Giving Statement

Don't forget to get those end of year donations in. You can give online here by 12/31/23 and know it will be included in your 2023 statement, likely to be sent in the first half of January. If you are sending a check, please note on the memo line it is for 2023 and we will do our best to have it included for you.

Newest addition to the team!

We are so excited to introduce our new Director of Fundraising and Partnerships, Morgan Crosby! She comes from the local Helping Hands thrift store ministry and we are thrilled to have her as a big part of Hope Creek. Here is a note from Morgan:

"To be able to serve others is a blessing and a precious gift, even more so as a career. I am so humbled to be working with such an incredible team like the one here at Hope Creek. The volunteers of the Food Bank are so incredibly dedicated and it is an honor to work alongside them. My role within Hope Creek will be to connect the community to our mission of feeding those experiencing food insecurity and to increase fundraising efforts for all of our important programs.

I am excited and honored to have this year ahead of me to launch into this important work with Hope Creek!"