(Seguin) — Families have two more days in which to register for the city of Seguin’s next round of free food. The city of Seguin says Wednesday at noon is the deadline to register for Thursday’s Mass Food Distribution event at the Seguin Events Complex parking lot. As a result of its three previous food distributions, the city has provided 381,000 pounds of food to 2,500 families in Guadalupe County.
Jennifer Sourdellia, the city’s public information officer, says the city is again partnering with the New Braunfels Food Bank and the Guadalupe Regional Medical Center, to help feed hundreds of families in Seguin.
“We are getting it pretty fine tuned. Again, it is going to the fourth time that we have done this. We have learned things to do differently and better every time we have done this. One of the things and I can’t hammer this enough in people is please pre-registered ahead of time. It’s going to be super duper hot on Thursday and whenever you pre-register ahead of time, that helps make the lines flow a lot faster and a lot smoother. It also helps our volunteers out too who are going to have to be on site that day registering. We do want people to register ahead of time. However, if they are not able to, we are not going to turn anyone away, we will have have people on site registering as well. But, we don’t want people to have to sit and wait in their hot cars while we are doing that,” said Sourdellia.
Sourdellia says the city is pleased about serving as the host for the event and for providing much of the labor that goes into serving 800 to 1,000 families at a time. It’s also for that reason, that Sourdellia encourages participants to sign-up before heading out to the Fairgrounds.
“This event is a drive-thru type service event where you just drive your car in. You’ll go to the check-in registration point and if you already registered, you will be directed in the line to go on through. There’s going to be different stations set-up and we are going to have different volunteers that will be loading different food items into people’s trunks, into their cars themselves, into the back of trucks and things like that. It’s all contactless. Our volunteers will be wearing masks for safety reasons so there’s no reason to feel unsafe when you are going through this. Our families that will be benefiting from this will be getting about two weeks worth of free food at the Coliseum that day and some of the items that we have given out in the past include a variety of fruits and vegetables, milk — we have given out boxes of frozen chicken, beans and canned foods and it’s too last a couple of weeks,” said Sourdellia.
Sourdellia says the city is also looking for a few good volunteers wishing to give up part of their day to help volunteer during the food drive. She says sign-up is easy and that there is a job for everyone.
“We couldn’t make all this happen without our awesome volunteers and volunteers are very very much needed for this distribution. At past distributions, we have had the help from the Texas National Guard Armory but their service at the distributions is now complete and they’ve moved on to serve a different mission. So, we have a lot of volunteer spots that we need to fill and we are asking people to sign-up at nbfoodbank.org/cvresponse or they can also call to register at 830-401-1360,” said Sourdellia.
Those going through the food distribution line will also get the chance to be counted in the 2020 US Census. She says the city wants the families to know that it’s things like the census that helps make these types of food drives a reality.
“You may not know this and people may not realize it but some of the data that’s generated by the Census helps determine the need and funding for programs such as this one in our community and that’s why it’s so important to be counted in the Census. So, citizens will have an opportunity to stop by a census area upon leaving the distribution. We are going to have some Census workers on hand to help citizens complete the census and I just want to remind people that the deadline to respond to the census is Sept. 30. It was initially Oct. 30 but that date has been moved up and rolled back a month earlier. What we want to do is we need to have a solid response rate in Seguin and Guadalupe County so we can continue to do programs such as this,” said Sourdellia.
The food drive will be held from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m. Thursday. A future drive is also scheduled for Thursday, Sept. 3. Registration is required at nbfoodbank.org or by calling 830-327-6000 or 830-401-1360.