NIH Exceeds ‘Feds Feed Families’ Goal
Darrick Akiyama (l) and Phil Waltz, both of NIAMS, won the 2019 “IC Food Fighting Hunger” CANstruction contest for creativity and number of donations. “We wanted a design that represented the work and research NIAMS does,” Akiyama said. “Focusing on arthritis, we came up with the design of a hand that had arthritis [cans in red]. It took a couple of hours to design it using Excel and about 2 hours to construct it.” About 540 cans were used—yellow (white beans) for the background, blue (black beans) for the hand and red (tomato) representing arthritis. Frank Quintanilla (not shown) was also instrumental in the design.
NCI’s Battle of the Towers CANstruction team included (from l) Tabatha Schrader, Tonia Cumberledge, Karen Smith, Barry Goldspiel, Deputy Executive Officer Eric Cole, Kelly Lawhead, Jordan Neal and Nanci Gottlieb.
Photo: Eric Williams
Among sorters are (from l) Nina Bennett, OD; Cheryse Sankar, NINDS; Linda Kiefer, ORS; Cathy Troutman, NHLBI; and Addie Brinkley, ORS.
Standing on sort duty are volunteers Shalini Sharma (l) of NINDS and Gene Burden of ORS; seated are Hana Desta (l) and Addie Brinkley, both of ORS.
An HHS truck picks up NIH donations for delivery to the Capital Area Food Bank.
Volunteer Shannon Griffin of NHLBI sorts donations.
Off-campus delivery team Vernon Bundick (l) and Allan Henderson, both of OALM, load food.
Volunteer food collectors (from l) Stinson Mackie, Gene Burden and Mark Patrick, all of ORS, take a photo break. Also on the team, but not shown is Percy Woods.
During this year’s annual government-wide Feds Feed Families campaign, NIH donated 49,228 pounds of non-perishable food items, greatly exceeding the 28,000-pound goal.
Over the course of 8 weeks, NIH’ers contributed to the campaign that will benefit three local partners—the Children’s Inn at NIH, Capital Area Food Bank and the Safra Family Lodge, as well as food pantries in the communities of NIH worksites in Arizona, Montana, North Carolina and Frederick and Baltimore, Md.
The successful effort combined employee generosity and diligent work by campaign lead, the Office of Research Services, which joined the Office of Acquisitions and Logistics Management to collect and sort donations and coordinate the giving with all 27 institutes and centers. In addition, food services vendor Eurest repeated its successful “Fighting Hunger” voucher program and added the new “Keep the Change” effort in its campus cafeterias; all proceeds (more than $6,000) directly benefitted the Children’s Inn and Safra Family Lodge.