Pittsburgh Tote Bag Project

Posted by Julie | 2 comments

***Guest Blog by The Pittsburgh Tote Bag Project***

The Pittsburgh Tote Bag Project invites you to support local food pantries by donating a tote bag during the Holiday Tote Drive Project. Your tote bag will be passed along to a client relying on a local food pantry to feed their family. Each month, Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank distributes 1.9 million pounds of food to over 120,000 people living in an 11 county area.

The tote bags can make it much easier to manage the food pantry donations, especially items that are bulky or heavy. They reduce the use of disposable bags and the money saved from buying those bags can be spent on food.

To date, the project has collected over 8,600 bags. This translates into serving more than 4,000 households and keeping over 25,000 disposable bags from being used at the food pantries.  We are very pleased to have worked with dozens of organizations and set up 16 permanent drop-off spots to continue our work into 2012 and beyond.

The Holiday Tote Drive works like this. A tote drive organizer registers at our website (http://www.tote4pgh.com) and collects at least 25 tote bags. Typically, you might ask your friends, family and perhaps a few coworkers to simply pass along their extra bags.  Other ideas include setting up a tote bag drive instead of the usual holiday grab bag. Or asking guests to bring a tote bag to a holiday event or activity. When we receive your bags, you are entered in a raffle drawing for some fabulous prizes, including a gift card to The Cheesecake Factory, gourmet food baskets, movie passes, and a pair of loge box seats to an upcoming Penguins game for the person who collects the most bags.

You can support the project by contributing to the drive organized by Julie at Coldwell Banker. You can also launch your own drive and help us get the word out even more.  We’ve had drives organized by Girl Scouts, quilting clubs, families, other non-profit organizations, at dances, crafting events and even a superhero tote drive. It can be a wonderful time to talk with your children in an age appropriate way about the realities of hunger. 1 in 4 children in the United States experience hunger at some point in their young lives. Shopping together for nutritious, kid-friendly food to include in your tote bag is a wonderful family experience.

We invite you to join us in making the holidays merry and bright by infusing a simple gesture of donating a tote bag into your holiday plans.  For more information, please contact us tote4pgh@gmail.com.  We are on Facebook www.facebook.com/tote4pgh and Twitter @Tote4Pgh as well as Google+

The Pittsburgh Tote Bag Project

“Helping our neighbors and our environment, one tote bag at a time.”

P.O. Box 99204

Pittsburgh, PA 15233

(412) 228-0216

Visit us at:  www.tote4pgh.org

2 Responses

1. Dorthea Timmons says:

   December 2, 2011 at 11:54 am

   Looks like a simple and easy way to support a charity in Pittsburgh. Thanks
2. Sue says:

   December 2, 2011 at 10:05 pm

   Thanks for the post and your support. We are looking forward to a great response from Peters!