I’ve been volunteering at Sacramento Food Bank & Family Services (SFBFS) on a regular basis for the better part of a year now. Generally, I’m there twice a week; more if they’re having an event or need a little extra help. The holidays are always a busy time at SFBFS with their Turkey Drive, Run To Feed The Hungry and Adopt-A-Family all happening in quick succession. Despite the immense amount of planning required for these events and the short time frames, these events are always tremendously well organized by the SFBFS staff, so all that we volunteers have to do is show up.

I was fortunate enough to help out at the Thanksgiving events this year and thoroughly enjoyed them, thus I was looking forward to the Christmas Adopt-A-Family program. The program was being led by the staff at the Saca Community Learning Center (an SFBFS satellite office in North Sacramento). The program sought to help clients who attended the classes offered and received services over the past year. In all, 274 families signed up. If one only looked at the numbers, facilitating gifts between 274 adopted families and those doing the adopting would seem a small task when compared with recent events providing Thanksgiving food boxes to 5,500 families, arranging the distribution of 3,000 frozen turkeys to other community groups, or trying to coordinate parking for 28,000 Run To Feed The Hungry participants. However, as the adopting families began to bring in their holiday purchases, it quickly became evident that this was no trivial undertaking. For ease and organization, as the gifts came in, the gifts were put into large bags, several gifts to a bag; and most families had multiple bags. Doing the math, then, you realize that the number of Christmas presents that we were dealing with easily reached the several-thousands.

I was given the task of organizing the gifts as they came in so they could be catalogued and then easily located when the time for distribution came. We set up a numbering system and organized two huge rooms full of gifts. We sorted out gifts that had lost labels, tracked down presents that had been separated from their mates and rewrapped packages that had lost their wrapping. We tracked the gifts as they came in and monitored them as they went out. Hiccups arose and were sorted out (primarily by Genevieve Deignan, Saca CLC Building Director, who really made this whole thing work), and by the evening on Wednesday December 23rd we had brought in, catalogued, organized and then distributed Christmas presents to over 350 families (because of the tremendous outpouring of gift donations, we were able to make up another 75+ gift bags to give to those who hadn’t signed up as part of the Adopt-A-Family program).

So it was finally over. We’d worked for many weeks, organizing a ton of gifts, to give to a huge amount of deserving people. When working on big events like these, it’s easy to get caught up in the numbers - turkeys donated, runners attending, families adopted. They’re tactile; a way to measure your success. But in the end, though, you realize that it isn’t about the numbers. They’re not the point. They’re not the reason you do this. Helping a man carry gifts to his car and knowing that the kids in the back seat will have something under their Christmas tree is the point. The gratitude in the eyes of an elderly grandmother taking care of her three young grandchildren is the point. Seeing the eyes of another volunteer well up from being able to help someone who has nothing; that is the point. These are the reasons we do this. The people at Sacramento Food Bank & Family Services know this better than anyone.

The above was written by SFBFS volunteer Chris Suter