Our trusty old Toyota truck at the Rocklin Estates Mobile Home Park, delivering food and flowers to residents. Click the photo for info about this opportunity!

October Recap and November Updates:

We Hired Heidi!

If you've volunteered at one of our mobile distributions, you may recognize our newest Program Support Specialist! Heidi Knost (pronounced "kuh-nost") has volunteered with us for over a year, mostly as a check-in lead at the Roseville and Lincoln distributions, and we are over the moon to bring her on as full-time program staff!

Before joining our team, she worked for many years as a public health nurse in Placer County. She has lots of experience helping underserved folks access affordable dental care, as well as training staff and volunteers, planning events and resource distributions, creating collateral for the programs she supervised, and more. She will be helping out across the full spectrum of our programs as she gets familiar with the inner workings of the food bank, and will soon be the point person for our scheduling and correspondence, as well as helping expand and improve our outreach efforts. Welcome to the family, Heidi, we are so glad you’re here! 

Holiday Shifts and Schedule Changes

The holidays are upon us! We have added additional spaces to our Lincoln and Rocklin distributions to manage the larger crowds we expect to attend, and we will be adding additional warehouse shifts to help prepare the food for these events. If you're interested in helping out at one of the distributions, there are still a handful of open spots so sign up soon! 

If you are signed up to volunteer at the Rocklin distribution this month, please note that it will take place on Wednesday, November 23rd, instead of the usual Friday due to the Thanksgiving holiday!

We also have slightly expanded rosters for the mid-late December distributions, so if you can't get a spot in November, next month may still have some room. To hopefully make your holiday season planning a bit easier, Jeremy and Heidi have already put December's shifts online so you can plan your volunteer shifts as you plan the rest of your holiday season.

Lead Volunteers Needed

As our distribution numbers continue to climb, we are packing more food than ever and we need some help leading volunteer groups, training new folks, and other possible leadership opportunities. Click here to sign up for more info about what being a lead volunteer entails and to get info about our next upcoming training.

Urgent Needs Page on Volunteer Website

Many of you ask us which shifts need the most help, and our answer changes every week if not every day. To make it easier for you to find when we are most desperate for help, we created a page to highlight upcoming shifts most in need of volunteers. It lives in a tab in the sidebar on the website, or you can find it by clicking this link. 

CalFresh and Outreach Help Needed

We have a few outreach events coming up and we need some folks to help prescreen people for CalFresh eligibility and spread the word about the resources that PFB offers. We have a handful of trainings available over the next 6 weeks and encourage anyone who is interested in serving as a representative for PFB at local events to sign up! 

Click here to get more info about upcoming trainings for this opportunity.

With gratitude and best wishes,

Heidi, Grace, Jeremy, Shatonia, and Johnny

Distribution Data

The graph shows households per month at Placer County mobile distributions in calendar year 2021 vs this year (2022). 

Although not native Californians, they grew up in Southern California in the 1950’s and 1960’s. They both come from working class families (2 parents and 5 kids in both families). They got married young and are now working on their 54^th year of marriage. They raised 4 kids, 2 boys and 2 girls – all college grads. And they have 3 grandkids – 2 live in New York and 1 in Oregon. Steven is a Vietnam Vet who attended college under the G.I Bill and has been retired for 13 years. His hobby is golf, which he gets to play normally every Monday or Tuesday with a group of fellow retirees. Doreen was a stay at home mom and homemaker. Her hobbies include genealogy and arts and crafts. They have lived in the Sacramento Area for close to 40 years now and started volunteering at the food bank in January of this year and extremely enjoy the people they have met and worked with and find the overall experience very rewarding. We are truly grateful for their help and they are amazing at making people feel welcome. Most importantly, they still make each other laugh and they spread the laughter and good vibes with everyone.

I worked for the State of California, retired from Dept. of Corrections, Prison Industry from the Budget Bureau. We provided the budgets for the Prison Industry part of all the California prisons. 

My husband and I traveled to mostly all the states. We had a deal that he got to pick the vacation one year, and me the next. I have seen so many battlefields, and he learned how to relax on a ship deck! After he died, and not wanting to travel alone, I offered to take grandkids wherever they wanted to go, within reason, as their high school graduation gift from me. Best time ever! One on one time while visiting European countries. We have been to some fabulous places, and I have special memories with each grandchild. Italy next summer for the last grandchild, then I am off to find new adventures. 

I searched for the “right” volunteer opportunity for me. Nothing I tried seemed to give me the joy/satisfaction that I was looking for. Here’s the scene… Friday night, with the IPad searching for something, when I saw the offer to volunteer at the Placer Food Bank. I figured I would give it a try. It was the perfect fit for me! Now I look forward to my days of bagging vegetables, sorting, salvage and even those Friday cleaning days, but the thing that warms my heart the most are the distribution days. To see the end process of all the good the food bank does. Each and every thank you, so happy you volunteers are here, and God bless you, reaffirms I made the right decision.

Danette is one of our fearless lead volunteers at our mobile distributions and we love seeing her between her shifts as a nurse and her various adventures around the globe! We travel vicariously through her, and are always looking forward to hearing about her most recent trip. 

In her own words: "It’s difficult to write about yourself! I’m Danette. I started volunteering at the food bank at the end of March of 2020, right at the start of Covid. I’m a labor and delivery nurse at Sutter Roseville. I enjoy hiking and mountain biking, but my passion is traveling. If you don’t see me for a while at the food bank, I’m likely on a trip! I’ve been to all 7 continents and I just got back from Nepal and India last week."

You probably recognize Stuart from a mobile distribution, although he's at the warehouse almost every week as well. Jeremy gave him the nickname "Professor Produce" and he wears it with a quiet smile and a chuckle. Stuart always has a funny observation or quiet quip to brighten our days, and he wows us with stories from his time working at the LA Zoo.

He says: "I moved here from Los Angeles 6 years ago.

I'm retired from the Los Angeles Zoo, where I worked as an Animal Keeper and Lead Keeper for 30 years. I worked just about all areas, including the Veterinary hospital. My last assignment before retiring was Elephants. My favorite area if I had to choose only one, would be Reptiles. I had the pleasure to meet and work with many celebrities, including the late Betty White, Slash (G&R) and Shaquille O'Neal to name a few.

I moved to Rocklin where I share a house with my sister" (who also volunteers with PFB!) "We have two cats named Archie and Edith.

I'm an avid reader but also enjoy fishing and hiking.

My favorite foods are anything I'm not supposed to have, which covers fried, salted and sweets. I do cook sometimes.

I started volunteering at the PFB about 2 years ago, after seeing it on a volunteer website. I enjoy bagging and packing food and produce, and helping out at the food distributions. You can actually see the food you packed being used. I hope to volunteer more days at the warehouse in the future." 

If you ever feel inclined and able to make a financial donation,

click here to view our online donation website.

Please know that the last thing we want is to make volunteers to feel pressured to donate money, because you are already so generous with your time. We so appreciate your gift of time and spirit, so please don't ever worry that it's not enough on its own.