Center picks up food from Kiwanis food drive

Since 2015, the Kiwanis Club of Starkville has done an annual food drive in a partnership with United Way, and since last year, the Kiwanians have taken full responsibility for the food drive.

This week, the Kiwanians have opened the garage door into their food pantry held at the Starkville Community Church for organizations to take and place into their own food pantries for the community in need.

On Thursday, members of the Starkville Oktibbeha School District's Discovery Center stopped by to do exactly that.

Elizabeth Williams of the Discovery Center expressed how thankful she and her organization are for the Kiwanis Club of Starkville allowing them to come and pick up some food for them to give to SOSD students and families.

“[The Kiwanis Club] has always been a big supporter of the Discovery Center, and we're very grateful,” said Williams. “We're excited to have this food because within the several projects that are going on at the Discovery Center, we serve a lot of families who are in need. So, we're going to be able to identify some families that may need this food and get it directly to them.”

Kiwanis Club member Richard Switzer has been on hand at the pantry at the Starkville Community Church all week, and he says that with how the pandemic has made a big hit on food banks, that makes the urgency to get the food out even bigger.

But the food drive isn't the only service project that the Kiwanians have to benefit the community.

“We try to do a food drive at least once a year, and if it works out, we'll sometimes do it twice a year,” said Switzer. “We also do the book giveaway at the Starkville Community Market on Saturdays, so we can help support education and reading. Nutrition and good food are important, but so is reading and education … the Partnership School and Starkville Academy have helped us with big food drives where students collected a lot of canned goods, and we also just received a grant from the 4-County Foundation to buy a lot of the food we didn't have, like the cereal, rice, and spaghetti.”

The motto for the Kiwanis Club is to be a group of volunteers working to improve the world, one child and one community at a time. Switzer believes that between the food drives and the book giveaways at the community market on Saturdays, the club is on the right track of accomplishing that goal.

Switzer added that he on behalf of the Kiwanis Club of Starkville is grateful for Starkville Community Church and its pastor Joe Horan for allowing them to hold its food drive at the church.

“For almost every year we've done our food drives, we've been able to set up here in the loading dock and have people just pull their vehicles up on the ramp, so it has been easy loading food that way,” Switzer said.