The Salvation Army of Clovis and the Rotary Club of Clovis held a food drive Tuesday morning to help feed families in need due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Rotary Club of Clovis donated $15,000 to the Salvation to provide food boxes for three food drives over the next three weeks.
Jennie Onitsuka-Adams, Captain of the Salvation Army in Clovis, said that roughly $4,000 worth of food was distributed to families in their cars in a drive-through. As cars made their way through, workers loaded boxes into the vehicles.
Tuesday’s food boxes were filled with various items, including a frozen rotisserie chicken, corn, oranges, bread, Top Ramen, beef stew, peanut butter, boxes of macaroni and cheese and numerous other items.
The boxes, however, are only stocked enough to feed a family of 1 to 3 for a couple days.
With the coronavirus pandemic, Onitsuka-Adams said that the Salvation Army in Clovis had about a 40% increase of people coming to receive food, thus creating the need for a food drive.
But, Onitsuka-Adams said fewer people than expected showed up to receive food during the Tuesday food drive.
“Today we probably had about 300 people,” she said. “We were ready for 500, so we weren’t able to give out all of our boxes today, but we don’t know if that was because there wasn’t enough advertisement…I think there were other distributions happening in the area.”
The Salvation Army of Clovis typically distributes a commodities food box the first Tuesday of every month on behalf of the Central California Food Bank. Those boxes are given out by house number; the number of boxes a household receives is based on the number of people that live there.
“Being able to give them another food box two weeks later, we know that it’s not far-fetched that people will need those boxes very soon,” Onitsuka-Adams said.
Food drives are also scheduled at the Salvation Army of Clovis May 5 and May 19.