Federal Way garbage haulers collecting food bank donations

Dolores Proffitt has never stood in a food-bank line. But she knows life can change, particularly when times are tough.

So when she discovered a flier taped to her garbage can last week, asking for help, she and her husband, Clinton, went shopping and bought two bags of food to donate to the Federal Way community food bank

"There are so many needy people around," she said, "and people often forget about those who are less fortunate."

This week, in an unusual approach, the same folks who collect garbage are also scooping up food donations along their routes — all for the Multi-Service Center's food bank.

Waste Management's garbage haulers in steel-toed shoes and heavy work gloves are doing double duty. They went door to door last week with the fliers asking residents to donate nonperishable food items.

"This is the first time this has been done on this scale," said Tricia Schug, a manager at the Multi-Service Center. "We're hoping to fill the food bank."

Proffitt, a retired grandmother, was waiting when Waste Management's truck drove through her Century Palisades neighborhood this week. She handed the driver the bags and a note thanking Waste Management for remembering the needy.

It's been a caravan of caring this week, the first time Waste Management has partnered with the Multi-Service Center to help restock its bins. The event happens to coincide with Saturday's 16th annual Mayors' Day of Concern for the Hungry, where groceries throughout King County will provide drop-off bins for donated food that will go to local food banks.

Waste Management, which contracts with Federal Way to collect garbage for some 17,000 customers, is heeding Mayor Jack Dovey's call to extend the food-collection drive beyond a single day.

Waste Management representative Laura Moser sold her bosses on the idea. The drive is modeled after the annual springtime "Help Stamp Out Hunger" food drive by area mail carriers and their union, the National Association of Letter Carriers.

"We already had all the resources," Moser said. "It was just a matter of putting them out on the street."

Waste Management is using three company vehicles for daily food pickups.

In the past six months, contributions to the food bank are at their lowest, and demand for food at its highest in the past decade, Schug said.

The food bank gives food to about 2,500 clients a month; nearly half are under age 18. Staffers say they see from 20 to 30 new people every day the food bank is open — Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

"This is a great thing that Waste Management is doing for the food bank because the need we're seeing is tremendous," said Dini Duclos, head of the Multi-Service Center, which runs Federal Way's only food bank out of a small warehouse on South 336th Street.

The center also runs a clothing bank at the warehouse, and oversees hundreds of units of housing for the low-income and elderly in South King County, and offers educational training, and employment and energy assistance.

At other food banks across the county, donations also are down because of the economy, while requests for help are up, said Brian Anderson, operations director for the Emergency Feeding Program of Seattle & King County, the agency that coordinates the Mayors' Day of Concern food drive.

In February, the Emergency Feeding Program delivered 1,324 bags of food — a total of 20,740 pounds — to more than 100 feeding programs. By July, 2,319 bags of food — 37,627 pounds — were delivered.

Anderson fears the demand this fall, in the face of an increasingly sour economy, "will only accelerate into a situation where food banks across the county will be unable to feed those reaching out for help."

Charles E. Brown: 206-464-2206 or cbrown@seattletimes.com