While Andrea Florian and her team have been running annual food drives for as long as they’ve been selling real estate, they realized when COVID hit our communities that there was a deeper, more urgent need that one little annual contribution wouldn’t be able to touch.
Back in 2020, the team spoke with the Burlington Food Bank and heard how desperate the situation was, with more and more people out of work and fewer donations making it to the food banks, so they decided to run a weekly food drive program.
And it was literally a food “drive.” Florian Realty team members drove to community members’ houses to pick up their food donations. To ensure everyone was as COVID-safe as possible, the donations were collected in porch-pick-up style so that it would be contact-free for all involved. Andrea and her team took to social media and started promoting it as the “Burlington Cares” food drive, as they felt it was important to keep the focus away from their real estate company name and more on the drive itself. Andrea notes that it truly was — and still is — a community effort.
In just a few weeks, emails, Facebook messages, and personal text messages from people wanting to contribute started to flood Andrea’s phone and inbox. At times, as many as 70 or more families took part in the weekly drives, resulting in a huge amount of donations.
Word got out and soon enough requests were coming in from the local women’s shelter, who were overwhelmed with people escaping violence in the home over the course of the pandemic. Feminine hygiene products and diapers were added to the most-needed list. Halton Compassion Society and the Salvation Army needed coats, so the Florian Realty Team started a coat drive. Food4kids was struggling to reach out to families who usually relied on the programs at schools to make sure their kids were provided for, so a backpack drive and school snacks/lunchbox drive ensued.
Some families still donate weekly and have been for over two years now —some families will purchase everything on the most-needed list and give so much that a separate pick-up must be arranged for their donations. The response has been overwhelming. Clearly, the need continues and the community continues to give generously, so the intention is to keep the drive going on indefinitely.
Since COVID has died down a little, there are some weeks that are slower, so Andrea and her team are always trying to come up with ways to create incentive and renewed energy for the drive and maintain the community’s awareness of the constant need for donations to food banks and shelters for those who can afford to give.
This holiday season, in lieu of sending out Christmas cards and client Christmas gifts, the Florian Realty Team is matching $1 for every pound of food donated to the drive throughout the whole of December. So far, they’ve collected over 800 pounds of food, and there are still several weeks to go until December 31. The team has high hopes that they will be making a significant donation to the Burlington Food Bank, so keep those donations coming in!
If you would like to donate to the food drive, it’s simple! Just email your name and address to: hello@florianrealtyteam.ca to be added to that Friday’s route. Pick-ups begin at 10 a.m. each Friday. It can sometimes take the team a few hours to reach everyone, so they ask for your patience in waiting for your donation to be picked up. Donations are taken to the food banks and shelters that very same day and from now until December 31, the Florian team is doing a weekly weigh-in to keep track of the donations.
Through all of this, Andrea, Laura, Erin, Barb and Kathy have been overwhelmed by the generosity of their community, but most of all, by the resilience of the volunteers and the people who work tirelessly at these organizations, doing their best to make sure no one goes hungry. As Andrea said, “Once you start an endeavour like this, you really can’t put an end date to it. There are things you can’t unsee and once you recognize that you have the ability to help and do something positive, even in the smallest of ways, you know you simply have to keep going.”
