Perhaps unsurprisingly at a STEM-focused place like WPI, members of the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity chapter have the annual food drive down to a science.
Three decades of running the event has led to a certain level of fine-tuning, from gauging the number of bags they need to deliver so people can fill them up with perishables, to deciding which neighborhoods to return to year after year, to the logistics of getting all that food to the Dean Street fraternity house and then to Friendly House, where it will be distributed to several hundred families over the Thanksgiving holiday.
This year, it went off without a hitch. Members fanned out into the city and collected thousands of pounds of food and monetary donations for the longtime city family services agency. WPI junior Jacob Ruppert, LCA’s external vice president, said the fraternity estimates it has collected more than three million pounds of food since it started the drive as a community service project in 1994.
The system Lambda Chi Alpha uses is simple and effective. Members leave grocery bags with flyers in targeted neighborhoods in the city a week or two before Thanksgiving, asking residents to leave out whatever non-perishable items they can—or a monetary donation—the Saturday before the holiday. That Saturday morning, they go out in groups and collect the food. There’s no minimum request, said Jeremy Hudon, a junior at WPI and one of the organizers of the food drive this year.
“It can be as heavy or as light as they want,” Hudon said.
For the fraternity, it has become a tradition and a commitment.
“It’s really grown into an event,” Ruppert said. “It’s an expectation– nobody’s being forced to do it, but everyone just has a similar mindset. You drink water, you breathe air, you do the food drive. It’s part of our life. Everyone does it, and everyone enjoys it.”
By noon the Saturday before Thanksgiving this year, a mountain of grocery bags filled with every canned good imaginable, boxes of stuffing, macaroni and cheese boxes, and more lined a hallway inside the fraternity house. The beep-beep-beep of the Friendly House box truck reversing into the driveway signaled to the 50 or so fraternity brothers that it was time to mobilize.
As Michael Moreshead, senior case manager and director of special projects at Friendly House, opened up the truck, the brothers lined up out the door and started passing bags. Many hands made light work, and the truck filled up in 15 minutes.
Moreshead said the fraternity’s haul will be combined with donations of turkeys from various organizations and companies across the region to give families a true taste of Thanksgiving.
“This is what Friendly House is all about: the community looking after itself,” Moreshead said. People of Worcester come out and support folks in their season of need. Lambda Chi recognizes this, and they’ve stepped up for 30 years now. It’s what community is all about, and what the holidays are all about.”
