Division representatives after last year's food drive.

Helping fight hunger in our state is a worthy investment of anyone’s time.  One in four children struggle with hunger in our state according the Arizona Association of Food Banks.  To do their part…  food banks in our state supply more than 11 million pounds of food every month.  But the food banks rely on donations and with so many people struggling to put food on their own table, it can be hard to drum up donations.  That’s one of the reasons we’re holding our 2nd annual food drive.

During last year’s pre-Thanksgiving food drive Team ADHS collected more than 7,000 pounds of food to the St. Mary’s Food Bank  in Phoenix…  and we sent a cash donation to the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona and Yuma Community Food Bank.  We’re kicking off this year’s annual food drive at our costume contest during lunchtime on Halloween.  We’re asking everyone who competes to bring a can of food as an “entry fee”.  Then we’ll collect food for about 3 weeks – this year our goal is 2 tons.

We’re going to have a little competition again, because people seem to like it.  So there will be six divisions competing – Public Health Prevention, The Arizona State Hospital, Licensing, Behavioral Health Services , Operations and Public Health Preparedness.