"It's probably a good thing to do"

Some charities, including the Franklin Food Pantry, will send donors letters acknowledging the gift rather than hand out receipts.

Anne Marie Bellavance at the Franklin Food Pantry said donations being dropped off and coming in the mail have picked up in the past two weeks.

"It's definitely on the minds of people the week before Christmas to ensure it does get credited as a tax donation (for this year)," she said. "We actually have a major donor who comes every year on Christmas Eve or it's mailed around that time and he does it partly to make sure it counts on that year's taxes."

The Franklin pantry is open until 2 p.m. Friday. Food donations are not assigned a monetary value but are listed by weight in a donation letter, Bellavance said. It's up to the donor or accountant to assign a value.

Read the full article in the Milford Daily News



Franklin, MA

Stamp Out Hunger - May 2010

About 40 volunteers got really organized to help the Franklin Food Pantry to process the receipts from the US Post Office letter carriers on Saturday, May 8th. As the letter carriers finished their routes, they drove by the Food Pantry to drop off the bags of food items they collected. Prompted by post cards and TV advertisements, as well as word of mouth, Franklin residents left out bags of non-perishable food to be donated.

With the new Food Pantry location in the middle of downtown, it was a convenient drive through operation. The trucks pulled up. A group took out all the bags of food stuffs.

Individual bags were put into letter boxes.

The bags and boxes were weighted.

The bags/boxes were opened and checked for "freshness dates". The good items were passed along to the sorters. The older items went into a waste box. Items that could not be determined by date when into a 'check later' box.

The sorters put like items together.

"flats" of similar items then stocked the shelves.

The shelves were completely empty early Saturday afternoon and filled up as the processing took place.

For those who did leave out a donation, the letter carriers left a thank you card:

Thanks to the many hands for helping to process over 5.000 pounds of food!

Weight In	4746.7
Spoils	877.2		18.48%
Net	3869.5

Strictly speaking, since the food was handled going in and then the spoils (waste) was handled again going out, we did go over 5,000. Which also excludes the multiple touches on a single item as it moved along the process.


Visit the Franklin Food Pantry online here: http://franklinfoodpantry.org/