THE FIREHOUSE FOODFIGHT
November 27 – December 22
The Firehouse Foodfight is a collective effort combined with a creative competition that is staged to rally the membership and local community to collect huge sums of food, clothing, and other items to help support local families in need.
Point System
Food Items
1 pound of food = 25 points
We are not asking the crews to count the items prior to the pickups for this year’s event. Our friends at Loaves & Fishes will be helping us by keeping the items separated while en route to the scales. They will be logging the pound totals per station for us.
Personal Care Items
1 Personal Care Item = 25 points
We are asking that crews who are contributing these types of items to the collection take a tally of the items prior to the pickup and send that count to the event team. If no counts are communicated, items will be logged as weight with the larger food item pickup.
Winter Clothing
100 Points for every Gently Used Coats & Jackets
50 Points for every hat, scarf, or pair of gloves/mittens
Clothing items will be distributed jointly to the families in need at Indian Prarie School District 204, Hesed House and Sharing Connections.
Community Partner Sites
500 POINTS FOR EACH PARTNER SITE
Any business, church, school or other organization recruited to host an additional collection site will result in a 500 point bonus, as well as the points for food collected at that site. Crews are responsible for logging food item count at secondary sites.
Adopt-A-Family
ADOPT-A-FAMILY | 5,000 POINTS FOR EACH FAMILY
This aspect of the drive is in partership with Indian Prarie School Dist. 204 and their programs designed to support homeless families in the district. Adopting a family amounts to a total of $150 in gift cards from a spedified listing. Please visit the homeapage for details.
Event Sponsors
Competition Details
This year’s competition will put all 10 stations and the admin office up against one another to see who can have the biggest impact.
We are squaring off to see who can collect the most donated food, personal care items and winter clothing items. We will once again be rewarding the recruitment of community partners as secondary collection sites. Also returning will be the the adopt a family program. New this year, we will be including a collection of bedding sets for Sleep in Heavenly Peace.
We will be rewarding the top 3 stations with pride and prizes to be shared among the crews.
Event Goals
Food Goal
10,000
TOTAL POUNDS
CLOTHING GOAL
1,000
TOTAL GARMENTS
Adopt-A-Family
10
TOTAL FAMILES
Partner Site Goal
25
SECONDARY COLLECTION SITES
BEDDING GOAL
50
TOTAL BEDDING SETS
Calendar
Friday, November 15
Event Launch
Tuesday, December 22
Pickup Date
Questions?
NPFFC Contact: Phil Carmody
Email: philcarmody@npffc.org
Ways to Give & Score
Great Causes to Support
Most Needed Food & Personal Care Items
The items from these lists will be donated to Loaves and Fishes Community Services whose mission is dedicated to providing healthy food and impactful programs to promote self-sufficiency.
Last year Loaves & Fishes provided food and support to 19,800 individuals or 5,776 families.
- Flour & Sugar
- Cooking Oil
- Cookie Mix
- Corn Muffin mix
- Crackers
- Candied Yams
- Canned Gravies
- Gravy Mix
- Dried Fruit Cereal & Oatmeal
- Spaghetti Sauce
- Pastas
- Ready-to-Eat Soup
- Canned Prepared Meals
- No Sugar Added Canned Fruit
- Household cleaning agents
- Diapers & wipes
- Toilet paper
- Toothpaste
- Shampoo
Adopt-A-Family
This year we are partnering with Indian Prairie School District 204 to help support their effort of collecting gift cards to assist more than 200 homeless families that are currently in the school district.
Adopting a family = $150 gift cards.
Cards must be purchased, packaged and sent to Phil Carmody at NFD Station 4. Gift cards must come from the above lists.
| BP | Meijer | Shell |
| Speedway | Thorntons |
|
Amusement Park
|
Books | |
| Bowling | Golf | |
| Hair Cuts | Movies | |
| Museums | Zoo |
| Burger King |
Cracker Barrell
|
|
| Denny’s | Domino’s | |
|
Dunkin Donuts
|
IHOP | |
| Jet’s Pizza |
Jimmy Johns
|
|
|
Little Caesars
|
McDonald’s
|
|
| Panera | Subway | |
| Taco Bell | Wendy’s |
| 7-Eleven | Aldi | |
|
American Express
|
Kohls | |
| Meijer | Target | |
| TJ Maxx | Walgreens | |
| Walmart | Visa |
Community Partners, Winter Gear & Bedding Sets
Spreading the reach of this event makes a huge impact! We will award the formation of community partners by crews and stations within their district when they find a partnership that leads to placement of an additional collection box at a site within your still district.
Additionally, all food collected at that site will be awarded to the respective station. Arranging logistics for pickups of food collected at those sites will be the responsibility of the crews. It is preferred that crews pickup the food at the sites and then bring those items back to the station for the scheduled Loaves and Fishes pickups.
Interested Crews Must:
- Contact event coordinators to request secondary site materials (box, flyer, letter)
- Upon securing a site, communicate the business/school/church/org site details and a contact person to Phil Carmody via email at philcarmody@npffc.org
Sleep in Heavenly Peace believes that all children deserve a safe and comfortable place to sleep. So many great charities provide clothing, meals, and toys to families in need. But as wonderful as this aid is, few organizations offer suitable beds and bedding to the kids in these families. Sleep in Heavenly Peace sets out to help fill that gap. If a child needs a bed, we want to make sure they get one. Their motto: No kid sleeps on the floor in our town.
SHP needs bedding sets to help complete their bed donations. They need twin bedding sets that must include the following:
- Twin Sheet
- Fitted Sheet
- Pillow + pillow case
- Comforter
The sets must be new and still in the packaging for them to utilize them. Donors are welcome to purchase their own and place in the station bins or donors can purchase via monetary donation or the Amazon Wishlist.
CLICK HERE to visit the wishlist.
We are once again collecting winter gear! Gently used coats, sweaters, and sweatshirts are in demand. We are also looking for hats, golves, scarves and mittens.
All of the above items will be accepted in infant thru adult 3XL sizes.
All winter apparel items are scheduled to be donated to Sharing Connections and their mission to support families in need.
CLICK HERE to learn more about Sharing Connetions
Foodfight Champions
Many Ways to Contribute
The food fight is a perfect opportunity for firefighters to give back to the community that we serve and that gives us the opportunity to do our duty. Each year the men and women at station 2 come up with new ways to produce bigger numbers. We do this out of pride and because of our competitive nature.
Often, people give me a hard time saying that they are going to beat us or that someone else is going to give us a run for our money. I tell them all the same thing, GOOD! I would love for another station or group to wipe the floor with us and our effort because the people in need will do that much better this year.
In the end, this program is all about relationships. Getting out and talking to people and giving them an opportunity to contribute to something bigger. If anyone would like to take our wonderful trophy I can tell you how to do it! Get out and talk to those we serve and explain how we can work together to make a difference.
One of the ways that our crew gets involved with the collections is to pool funds among the members of the crew to put toward some of the most needed items. So instead of how we used buy Christmas gifts for each other or the officer, now we put that money toward this effort and we all feel good about it.
Our crew likes to pile our efforts into purchasing a large cache of items from the most needed items list. We love the event and helping out these great causes in a very specific way. We make it a tradition to take a trip to Sam’s Club to purchase the items and then drop them off at Loaves and Fishes directly. It feels great to know exactly where our contribution goes and what it does to help struggling families.
Established
Articles of Winter Gear
Pounds of Food
Families Adopted
Big Impact
This event was started in 2016 as a food drive for one beneficiary organization. Since then we have grown and added the reach to include multiple beneficiaries and multiple types of collections.