Out of the Bag: Ten Ways to Organize a Family Holiday Project to Fight Hunger

We receive a lot of inquiries from parents looking for a family holiday project. Here are our top ten suggestions.

Our holiday theme this year is focused on collecting food and grocery items for ethnically diverse households. This lends itself to a group setting (office project) or to a smaller family setting. It is a good chance to talk about your own family's ethnic and cultural traditions. Here's the shopping list we created with the support of our food pantry partners, supporters and our foodie bloggers.

1. Set a budget and see how you can maximize shopping from the list using that budget. You might search for coupons or deals.

2. Pick a specific ethnic food type and search for items to make up meals or "stock" a pantry (like several spices in plastic or tins)

3. Take a trip together to an ethnic food store and purchase the items you can't find at the grocery store. This is especially nice if your children have never been in this type of store before. Check your patch.com for local resources.

4. Pick some staples (rice, pasta) and purchase those. A tote bag with bags or rice can do a lot of good.

5. Spend some time together researching the foods that are unfamiliar and maybe even looking up recipes. When you purchase an item to donate, perhaps buy something new for your family to try.

6.  If you want to get creative, research traditional ethnically diverse meals and see if you can find all of the items needed in nonperishable format. 

7.  Talk with your kids about hunger in children and ask them what they would like to purchase - perhaps picking one "treat" or again, exploring treats from other cultures to try together.

8. Ask each member of the family to "donate" one of their gifts or perhaps a portion of their allowance to the project. You can make that donation go 4x as far by sending a cash donation made payable to The Thomas Merton Center c/o P.O. Box 99204 Pittsburgh PA 15233. 

9. Make an "angel tree" or "giving tree" for your extended family. List the ingredients for a complete meal on each tag.  Or describe a composite family and donate the item for them for a few days. Even separate out ingredients and suggest participants purchase 4 or 5 of them same item in their bag. 

10. Touch base with your own cultural traditions. I recently wrote a post about my Grandma Jean's Hungarian Date Nut Pudding - realizing that I could purchase all but two ingredients (eggs and butter) if I chose. The beauty of that donation is that items such as baking powder, vanilla (not in glass) and flour are pantry staples for preparing other meals. 

All donations will be shared with Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank, making the items equally accessible to 200+ pantries throughout the region. The totes, too, will be a gift. It is perfectly fine to donate holiday themed tote bags. 

Once you've collected your donations, you can bring to a holiday project donation spot

Animal Nature - Regent Square

Woodland Hills EMS - Forest Hills**

Pittsburgh Public Market - Strip District

The Toonseum - Downtown

Home Consignments - Swissvale**

Basket of Pittsburgh - Robinson **

Moon Township Public Library - Moon **

** Indicates partners through the regional patch sites. New partners are still being sought through mid-November. 

Please note some of the other listed sites can accept tote bags only due to space constraints. And feel free to reach out to us by email

We promise to post all notes and cards from your family on our website to spread their message of hope, caring and compassion.

What suggestions do you have to connect your family's cultural holiday traditions to your giving back during the holidays?

The Pittsburgh Tote Bag Project collects new and gently used tote bags for distribution to the region's food pantries. We are a project of the Thomas Merton Center. Visit our website for a list of permanent drop-off spots, information on how to organize your own tote bag drive and details on our partnerships with corporations and promotional products items. You can also follow us on Twitter@Tote4Pgh and Facebook.com/Tote4pgh