Virtual Food Drive

Virtual Food Drive URL: (http://vad.aidmatrix.org/vadxml.cfm?driveid=924)

The Rhode Island Community Food Bank is pleased to offer a Virtual Food Drive. This secure website allows you to select foods of certain cash values and add them to a shopping cart. Once your cart is full, proceed to the virtual checkout and pay with your credit card. The Virtual Food Drive allows you to leverage more food for your donation and is convenient and easy to use.

Why a Virtual Food Drive?
A traditional food drive, where actual food is collected and then donated to the Food Bank, is a good resource for collecting non-perishable food items for those who need it most. Traditional food drives offer an opportunity for a “hands-on” experience in the fight against hunger in our state. By representing what your gift will provide, the Virtual Food Drive is a wonderful alternative to a traditional food drive.

Traditional Food Drive

• Five dollars spent on food (at the retail level) produces on average about 5-7 pounds of donated product.
• Donations must be collected and held for pick up or delivery, sometimes creating storage issues.
• People commonly forget to bring their bag of donated food to work or to the collection point.
• Picking up donations from food drives at various sites costs the Food Bank about $75 per pick up in the form of gasoline, insurance, driver pay and overhead.
• Handling, transporting, sorting and repacking food increases costs of operations and can cause damage to the product.
• There is no tax break when you purchase food to donate. There is a tax receipt generated when you participate in the Virtual Food Drive.

Virtual Food Drive Donating five dollars to the Food Bank through the virtual food drive leverages the purchasing of core, nutritious items not always donated through a food drive. A five dollar donation through the virtual food drive actually allows us to purchase about fifteen dollars worth of food or about 25-30 pounds of food. Funds collected through the Virtual Food Drive also contribute to the expense of transporting donated food. Donating to the Food Bank through the virtual food drive is efficient. Top quality food is immediately warehoused and distributed without the sorting and handling that traditional food drives require. Your contribution to the Food Bank through the Virtual Food Drive immediately produces a receipt indicating your charitable contribution and allows you to see how many meals your contribution will help to provide. Using the Virtual Food Drive allows you to help meet the need in our community, increase the value of your donation because we can buy more for less, eliminate storage and transportation issues and give you an immediate tax break. Either way, traditional or virtual, The Rhode Island Community Food Bank needs your support throughout the year to help end hunger in our state.