ShareNet has become an Albertsons Community Partner, which means 4 percent of what you spend at Albertsons will be donated to us as long as you’ve signed up in advance and used your blue Albertsons Preferred Savings Card at checkout. You must use your savings card to enable the donation. Just telling the cashier your phone number won’t work; the card must be scanned. To sign up, go to www.albertsons.com/cp/ then click the Shoppers login/registration. Click Find a Partner and enter “ShareNet Food Bank, Kingston, WA.”
If you’d like to donate but would prefer not to register yourself or don’t have internet access, we can sign up for you. Call (360) 297-2266, ext. 3, if you’d like us to sign you up, or if you have any questions or difficulty. This is a painless way to donate that doesn’t impact your wallet or time at all; it just utilizes what you’ve already spent at the grocery store. Now that’s a smart program. It’s easy to see what a significant benefit this will be to ShareNet if we can get a lot of Albertsons shoppers to sign up.
If you’ve avoided obtaining a Preferred Savings card, this would be a great reason to get one. Just ask your cashier. Though purchases from Sav-On Drugs do apply, other items are excluded, such as prescription medication, alcohol, tobacco, fuel, stamps and gift cards, meaning no donations are made from purchase of those items. You can choose up to four Community Partners to receive your donations, and decide your own allocation. Your privacy is protected: your name and contribution total is provided to us quarterly, and you can even opt out of that by clicking the anonymous button. Please sign up or let us do it for you.
Your donations are at work in our community: almost half the funds raised in last year’s Neighbor Aid campaign were earmarked for emergency assistance beyond food, and about $7,000 of crisis utility and housing payments have been made through May 31. In the same period, the food bank distributed approximately 65,000 pounds of food to almost 2,500 individuals through May.
ShareNet would like to remind everyone Kitsap Regional Libraries is hosting a summer-long food drive through August. We have barrels stationed at both the Kingston and Little Boston branches. Library staff report low donations so far, so we’d like to encourage people to patronize their local libraries, read — and while you’re there, please donate useful non-expired non-perishables throughout the summer.
We’d like to honor two of our (somewhat) unsung heroes who don’t get mentioned enough but are vital to ShareNet operations. Our Board Treasurer Bernard (Bernie) Delettrez helps maintain ShareNet’s financial records and donor databases, which requires a substantial amount of time and data entry every month. Our Board Secretary Barbara Brumagin is a tireless supporter of ShareNet’s mission, manages the agency’s interface with our sponsor Bayside Community Church, and performs many administrative functions for which there is no time among paid staff. Neither are the kind who would seek out any credit or recognition, but they deserve it. Thanks Barb and Bernie.
