Maryland Food Bank – Phoenix TS Gives Back

The Phoenix TS team got a head start on their New Year’s resolution by heading to the Maryland Food Bank on December 17. Phoenix TS has recently introduced a new initiative that focuses on giving back to the Maryland community, in which our organization thrives. As a company, we are striving to make volunteering an integral part of our mission and values and we decided to kick start our efforts this December with a trip to the Maryland Food Bank!

“Until Hunger Ends”

As their slogan suggests, the MD Food Bank is committed to ensuring every hungry person throughout the state has a warm meal to eat. The MD Food Bank is an affiliate of Feeding America, and was founded specifically to coordinate the procurement and distribution of food donations to Maryland’s hungry.  Their organization is comprised of three facilities in Salisbury, Hagerstown and Baltimore, and through these locations they were able to provide, in last year alone, 26.5 million pounds of food to our state’s hungry through a network of over 600 shelters, soup kitchens and pantries.

Phoenix TS Helps Out

The staff at Phoenix TS overwhelming voted to kick start the Giving Back Campaign at the MD Food Bank, and with the help of the Food Bank’s Volunteer Program Manager, Jill Rowlett, we were able to make it happen fairly easily! We sent a team of five employees from our Sales and Marketing Departments to the Food Bank and they spent the morning helping out the chefs by prepping the food that would be cooked later that day.

Typically, the Food Bank runs a culinary school in which the students are the ones preparing the food; however, their class had graduated a week prior, so the chefs needed a few extra hands in the kitchen. Our team was glad to help out and we spent the morning chopping up boxes full of the vegetables they needed. Chef Daniel provided great direction for everyone and stressed the importance of not wasting any viable parts of the vegetable including the thick, kale stalks, which can be ground up and incorporated into meals to add extra nutritional value.

In the three hours our team was there and along with the help of two other volunteers, we were able to cut up three boxes of cucumbers, two boxes of carrots, one box of onions and eight very large boxes worth of kale. While this seems like a lot, (and trust us, it was) it only put a small dent into the amount of work that Food Bank volunteers need to accomplish on a daily basis in order to help feed our state’s hungry. Nonetheless, our time spent at the Maryland Food Bank allowed us to lend our hands to help some of the 720,000 Marylanders who can’t regularly access sufficient amounts of food.

Help Us Choose Our Next Location to Give Back!

Our team could not have been happier with our experience at the MD Food Bank and we can’t wait until our next Giving Back event! To help us decide where to take our team next, we want to ask our students, partners and friends in the Maryland area to tell us which charitable organizations are dear to you? Comment below or share with us on our Facebook, twitter or Google+ pages which charities you support, so the team at Phoenix TS can vote as to where we should go next to give back!