The Department of Agriculture (USDA) has taken this year’s Feds Feed Families food drive with a new energy, diligently encouraging employees, farmers, and friends to donate both perishable and non-perishable items across the country in the Feds, Farmers, and Friends Feed Families food drive. A Sculpture Can Competition was announced at the USDA Headquarters as a way to inspire agencies to compete against each other and then produce a piece of art out of the donations they collected.
On Thursday, August 19th, 2010, USDA employees and friends creatively came together to raise even more donations for the hungry in the Capital Region in the Can Competition. The event alone raised over 2000 pounds of food. Attendees were encouraged to creatively build a sculpture out of the donations their agency collected, and the results were works of art that symbolized the continuing urgent need to fight hunger, ranging from corn to a farm that utilized solar power.
Rural Development was awarded 1st place for the farm they built; Marketing and Regulatory Programs (MRP) and the Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) received 2nd place for a tractor they designed (and even had an architectural sketch drawn beforehand). Natural Resources and Environment (NRE) came in 3rd place for building a helping hand out of non-perishable items.
This has been much more than just an effort at USDA Headquarters. AMS Cotton and Tobacco Programs’ Market News Branch in Memphis, Tennessee took their own initiative and created a “Cotton ‘Can’ Man” from their donations, to fit within their theme for the F5 Drive of “Working Together, Cotton and Tobacco Can ‘Can’ Hunger”.
So far, the USDA has tripled the amount of food donated last year and exceeded our nationwide goal of 50,000 pounds by collecting over 150,000 pounds of both non-perishable and perishable food. USDA employees are working every day and in every way to ensure food banks across the country are able to provide not only canned goods, but healthy, fresh food to those in need.