Support the Holiday Food & Fund Drive

Financial Donations

The fastest, easiest, and most cost-effective way to offer support is to give financially. You can donate at our UCSC fundraising page for the Holiday Food & Fund Drive. Though many people like to give anonymously, and for very good reasons, we recommend you attach your name to your donation. Seeing that you donated might help someone make the choice to donate, if they know you endorse this effort.

Time and Effort Donations

Give your time to this effort by sending out a few emails to folks you know, asking them to read up on this effort. Remember, you're not asking them for money, you're simply raising their awareness about a community effort that they may want to support.

You can also reach out to our team to see how you might be able to plug in and help our efforts. We could use help with making our website better, coordinating raffle events, writing thank you notes to donors, and any other great idea that you come up with!

Food Donations

The Second Harvest Food Bank prefers to receive donations of money rather than donations of food because:

• They can buy substantially more pounds of locally grown fresh fruits and vegetables with your donated money than you can provide cans of food with the same money.
• Fresh fruits and vegetables are much healthier for the families than almost all canned food.
• There is virtually no carbon footprint! Compare the carbon cost of a few clicks on the Internet to the carbon cost of transferring the food: store-to-home, home-to-barrel, barrel-to-warehouse, warehouse-to-people, and finally the people take it to their home.
• Just like the carbon cost, there is the cost of volunteer time. Managing the flow of donations is easier for SHFB, which frees up the volunteers to serve families in other ways.

The end-of-year student food collection is back! The SAB and UCSC Dining are partnering to collect all the excess food that is left over from students to either give it to the campus food pantries or deliver it to the SHFB food distribution center in Watsonville.

Other Donations

If you can think of another creative way for you to help us achieve our purpose, please reach out to us to begin the conversation.

Also, if you're already doing work like this, we'd like to partner with you to enhance each other's efforts if at all possible.