The Tarrant Area Food Bank held one of its final two Mega Mobile Food Markets of the year Thursday morning in Mansfield.
As area food banks try to keep up with the increased number of families needing help with their next meal, others are stepping up in the crisis.
Volunteers packed car after car full of food at Harvesting in Mansfield, ensuring no one goes hungry.
“It’s a godsend,” said Winnie Lee of Mansfield. “We are blessed that people take time out of their day to actually do this for us.”
The need is indeed great.
But so is the spirit of giving.
13-year-old Fort Worth twins Claire and Catherine McKnight have seen the long lines of cars waiting for food.
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“I’m used to getting food from the grocery store and people can’t afford it and it just makes me sad,” said Catherine McKnight.
The seventh-graders whipped up their grandma’s pecan caramel chocolate turtle treats and sold them to help the Tarrant Area Food Bank.
The teens handed the organization a check for $6,000.
“It felt really good because I know a lot of people will benefit from it,” said Catherine.
The girls did the same thing in the spring, which yielded a smaller donation for the food bank.
In Rowlett, Ernest and Florence Smith have been thinking about how popular a giant red chair he built his wife for Mother’s Day years ago has been with others.
The two recently posted a picture of it on social media.
“It got so many hits, about 17,000 hits and we thought: We got a lot of hits off this chair. Maybe we can do something,” said the couple. “And then we came up with the idea that we would build one for charity.”
The husband and wife built a seven-foot-tall cedar chair in about a week, complete with a footstool.
The two are selling $25 raffle tickets online until December 31 to benefit the North Texas Food Bank.
Their goal is to raise $20,000 for the non-profit that has been providing boxes of food to needy families.
“I remember the picture of the last food drive where you had people waiting for 12 hours and just lines and lines of cars,” said Ernest Smith. “And you want to do something. You realize you can’t help everybody, but you can do something.”
These inspirational North Texans are helping their neighbors with kind gestures, big and small.
“It’s well-needed right now,” said Claire McKnight. “We need more people to do things like this.”
To learn more about the big cedar chair raffle, click here.
The Tarrant Area Food Bank will be at Herman Clark Stadium in Fort Worth on Friday morning for its final Mega Mobile Food Market of 2020.
The North Texas Food Bank will be UNT Dallas on Friday for a food distribution as well.
