If you're looking for how you can donate or volunteer, please read this page.
First and foremost, I want to be completely up front and note that this is a small group of people giving back to the community, but we are not a tax exempt donation/officially registered charity. My goal is as it always has been with this, get people who need food some food. The costs/time requirements of going through all the steps for this registration at the size and scale we are did not, and still does not, make sense as that takes away from our limited resources to buy food and make meal kits.
I do, however, meticulously track every penny spent, every year, on this Google Sheet which you can view for reference so that if you still would like to donate, given the above, you're aware of what the money is going to. It also has an added benefit of helping me track costs year over year and my data nerd is stepping it up for 2025.
Given the above if you'd still like to donate, I'd be more than happy to accept! I generally set an out of pocket budget going in to each year (which I've always gone beyond except 2024 thanks to the largest donation in the history of doing this from the ownership group of our local Domino's pizza franchise), and keep to that regardless of the donations that come in. Anything you donate that would lessen that gap gets turned into extras for people in need (kitchen utensils, pots, pans, mixing bowls, and so on) as well as nicer/more items for each kit. Beyond that, extra donations will result in me purchasing more food for local food banks so that outside the event itself we can keep helping people in the area.
Please email foodforpullman(at)gmail(dot)com for more information on how to best arrange this.
I can accept donations via Venmo, PayPal, or Cash.
While we don't accept donations for sponsorship/advertising purposes directly if you are tied to a local business or want to plug a local event/charity of your own (with approval) larger donations will get a grateful shout out from me on the website and event communications.
If you're looking to volunteer or assist in some way please reach out to the same email address with what you would like to assist with. Generally speaking I absolutely adore that anyone would like to take time out of their day, especially during the holiday season, to assist. That said, this is a very small team of people putting this together and often the coordination of volunteers takes quite a lot of time.
Volunteers for delivery are usually always needed though, so if this interests you and you have transportation and are willing to make some deliveries around the City of Pullman this can be a massive help! As a note all deliveries go out on the Wednesday afternoon of the event (November 26th for 2025) after the event starts. There have usually been some deliveries requested later that I deliver on Thanksgiving morning (I can continue to handle these myself, but if you have availability or desire to help here and can be "on call" for a morning delivery at a reasonable time this would be a gigantic help).
Other great volunteer opportunities would be if you can gather donations around your home or workplace and bring them by for the event's attached food drive. The donations after the event fluctuate pretty highly each year because of the ability for people to actually come by, so if you can gather things over the month of November from your office this would be great, I can even work with you to come by and pick everything up or arrange a time to meet somewhere in town.
As far as putting all the kits together I have this pretty well handled as we enter year five (plus my home office ends up looking like a borderline Costco leading up to the event, I'm not sure having outside help on site would be safe), but some things that would be massively helpful are things like printing out nice name cards for each kit to be handed out (that I could fill in the blank on who/size), or other crafty things that might make each kit feel more special and holiday themed.
If you have other ideas or want to pitch another way to assist, please do reach out. I'm happy to hear you out!
Rob, 2025