Pope & Land Real Estate
By: Pat Becker, Marketing
Pope & Land is proud of its commitment to serving those in need in our metro Atlanta communities. Our team members were recently given the opportunity to volunteer at the Marietta Salvation Army location as part of the 40th Annual Can-A-Thon, a canned food collection drive and partnership between Publix, 11Alive and The Salvation Army, to ease the burden of food insecurity for thousands of our Georgian neighbors.
40 years ago, 11Alive’s community relations manager reached out to The Salvation Army about partnering to collect food items for some of those families who suffer from food insecurity. From that initial conversation, the 11Alive Holiday Can-a-thon was born and for the past four decades, the Friday after Thanksgiving has always been the event day for the Holiday Can-A-Thon.
Pope & Land’s community service team, along with other community volunteers, set-up collection bins at the Marietta Salvation Army and unloaded/sorted thousands of individual donations as well as donations collected by metro Atlanta schools, local businesses, and organizations as they drove their cars, SUVs, and trucks thru the drop-off site.
Highlights from this year’s event included visits from Santa, a singing choir, and thousands of cans – nearly 250K to be exact. Donations from each of the four collection sites were delivered to a massive warehouse and then distributed among food insecure families before the year’s end. In addition, items will be pulled from the warehouse throughout the year, as needed, to stock The Salvation Army’s 13 metro Atlanta-area food pantries.
In Georgia 1,141,880 people are facing hunger of which 360,210 are children. One in seven children in metro Atlanta lives in a home that’s food insecure daily. Because hunger never takes a holiday, Pope & Land would like to invite you to join us in making a commitment to drop-off donations to your local community food bank throughout the year to help decrease those numbers and make a difference in the lives of those in need. The items that are most needed are non-perishable food items, canned goods (vegetables, soups, meats, sauces, fruits), dry goods (pasta, beans, oatmeal, grits, crackers, cereal), baby formula, and baby food. For convenience, interested donors can also shop online for food items on the Can-A-Thon Amazon Wishlist here.
TEAM – Together Everyone Achieves More