What better way to end a day than by helping out at the Oregon Food Bank? What better way, I asked myself, to end specifically the day wherein my job called upon me to help transition 8 employees involved in a plant closing?
Xenium Human Resource Business Partners are tasked with such a wide variety of responsibilities when supporting our clients and their employees. Few weigh more heavily than assisting in reductions in force and lay offs, unfortunate separations wherein hardworking and talented people are left wondering where their lives will take them in the next few months, where their next paycheck will come from and how they will get by.
It was after such a meeting that I joined other employees of Xenium and our sister organization, Express Employment Professionals, to prepare food at the Oregon Food Bank. It felt so good to plunge into the assembly line work of bagging up pinto beans to feed hungry Oregon families, surrounded by cheerful volunteers and outgoing Food Bank employees.
We met and mingled with a gifted group from the West Linn High School Honor Society who told me they volunteer once or twice a month of average. They worked shoulder to shoulder with a group of senior citizens that enjoy helping out the food bank on a weekly basis, digging in to the often physical work of food bank prep with competitive zeal.
Every time we successfully prepped a full pallet of beans a bell rang and everyone cheered, celebrating our shared contribution. Beans scattered across the floor despite our best efforts to save every precious morsel, but spirits were high and very few folks begged off to go on the facility tour a half hour before the end of our two hour commitment, preferring instead to stay and work just a little more, get a few more bags done, have a hand in feeding a few more folks.
That night we prepared almost 4,000 meals that night and left feeling victorious. A small step toward supporting and organization that feeds more than an average of 240,000 people each month. The Food Bank’s website notes that, “since the beginning of the recession, emergency food box distribution increased a total of 17%…130,000 more food boxes than it did two years ago.”
That’s a sobering statistic. But rest assured there has been an equally strong response to this call to action. In the total Oregon Food Bank network, volunteers spent 1,981,000 hours in 2009 and 2010, working to combat hunger. It was truly a privilege, and so much fun, to be counted among them.
