Submitted by Guest Blogger: Maryann Courter, Supervisor Customer Support

Amway Customer Support employees enjoy participating in a variety of volunteer projects throughout the year, from volunteerting at Gilda’s Club, to helping out at the Special Olympics spring and summer games, to writing Pen Pal letters, and collecting toys for the US Marines Corps Toys for Tots Drive.

There’s one organization, however, that we have supported for almost a year, Kids Food Basket.  Kids Food Basket is a relief agency in Grand Rapids, MI which provides after school meals and snacks to children that might otherwise go to bed hungry.

Once a month, crackers, raisins, M&M’s and other munchies are purchased in large quantities and a small assembly operation is set up. The next morning, the ingredients are all mixed together in large bins.  Volunteers gather early before work and establish a mini production line of mixing, scooping, bagging, sealing, counting and boxing.  Our goal is to produce hundreds of bags of trail mix for hungry kids that need a snack.  It takes 8 – 10 people to bag up all but one batch by 8:30 AM.  By 9:30, three or four people complete the last batch and clean up, wash tubs and put everything away for the next month.  We have a driver from Telecom who picks up the boxes and delivers everything to the west side of Grand Rapids, also on his own time.

We all have fun and even solve some work-related issues while gathered around packing bags of trail mix for the kids.

Teams assemble 600 to 700 trail mix bags each month.  Over 6,000 bags have been sent this year to feed kids who don’t get enough to eat every day when they leave school.

In addition to the trail mix project, we have 2 dozen people who decorate white paper lunch/supper sacks.  The decorated lunch sacks send a message to the kids that they are valued and that they matter.  Three or four times a year, 2,000 decorated bags will be used to send sack lunch dinners to hungry kids via Kid’s Food Basket.  Often, it’s the little things we do that actually mean a lot.