Have you noticed one of these red barrels in the grocery store where you shop? The DMARC Red Barrel program raised more than 130,000 food items in 2007, more than 10 percent of all of the food we collected. Contributing to the red barrel is as easy as buying a few extra cans of food while you shop and dropping them in on your way out. Another even better way to contribute is to buy a $5.00 hunger sacks, a grocery bag containing the most needed items. All food collected by the Red Barrel Program goes to the
DMARC Emergency Food Pantries.
Sack Saturday volunteers encourage support of the Red Barrel program by working in local grocery stores and asking shoppers to:
- Purchase Hunger Sacks for the red barrels
- Provide cash contributions
- Purchase and donate individual food items
Sack Saturdays are staffed by groups of volunteers from churches, schools, businesses and civic organizations. Events typically run from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. on a Saturday morning and require a minimum of four volunteers (two volunteers per two hour shift).
All food collected in the red barrels is collected and taken to the Des Moines Area Religious Council’s Emergency Food Pantry Warehouse. There it is sorted and distributed to the nine metro area food pantries.
For more information or to schedule a Sack Saturday, contact Cindy Morton, Red Barrel Coordinator at 515-277-6969 or
click here.