Chicago Food Depository

Check out the photos!
Once again, ATS shows that there are lot's of ways to have an adventure! Chuck Brown was good enough to introduce us all to another. Many dedicated ATS members took a Saturday morning to go down and volunteer at the Chicago Food Depository.

The Chicago Food Depository is a massive, warehouse-style operation. We rallied there at 8:45 and signed in and took a seat in their break room for a quick lecture and a video regarding the problems of less fortunate people in the Chicago area, and how the Chicago Food Depository helps out by collecting donations of food from donors. The food is then taken and sorted, repackaged (that's where we came in) and then sent out to people who need it.

There were several projects going on that morning, unfortunately, we didn't get to work with the Velveeta Cheese! But we were paired up with a gang from Stevenson High School (They Rock!) to re-package water! That's right, bottled water!

Some fine organization had donated a massive amount of bottled water for the project. Our job was to break open the big boxes, which held about 80 bottles each, pull them out, and put them into smaller boxes (that held 8 bottles each). Then the boxes were taped up, and labeled.

Next the smaller boxes were stacked on pallets for the forklifts (you can't drive the fork lifts!) to pick up and take away. There is quite an art to stacking the pallets, to you can't let just anyone do it! Bob soon became one of our resident experts, so if we're ever out in the middle of nowhere and need to stack pallets of bottled water, he's one we'd better have along.

You know, water is just plain heavy, and soon a lot of us were layering down, and then breaking into a sweat. Soon it became clear that the Chicago Food Depository had not planned on this crowd showing up. Maybe they were expecting a troop of Brownies, or maybe the Webloes, but certainly not ATS and the hard-working gang from Stevenson High! We started at a pretty good clip, but after about an hour of hard work, we figured out 'the system' which let us do it conveyer-belt style.

Soon we were allowed a brief break, complete with sodas and snacks provided by the Food Depository, then back to our working frenzy!

When it was all said and done, we (along with our new friends from Stevenson High) had packed;

24.5 pallets
1486 boxes or
26,748 lbs. of water!

There were a few times we had to take a small break for the Food Depository to print more labels, or bring in the forklift to carry away our finished product, but we finally had to quit because they just plain ran out of water. No problem though, cause Adventurer's can adapt. As long as we had been surrounded by food all day, it was time to get some for ourselves! A quick trip to Giordano's hit the spot, with fine pizza and great conversation with our fellow Adventurer's.

Many thanks to Sally, Megan, Kathy, Bob, Mark, Molly, Linda, Roxana, Janet, Johnine, Ren, Melodi, Pamela, David and especially Chuck for arranging this great event!