The Society of St. Andrew, the Auburn Wesley Foundation and the Committee of 19 sponsored the Sweet Potato Drop Thursday, Oct. 18, for potato distribution across East Alabama.
Despite the oddity of seeing a mountain of potatoes in a parking lot, the spuds will feed the hungry of East Alabama.
"We had a total of 131 volunteers sign up, and out of those there were a great number of Hunger Studies students and Committee of 19," said Teresa Seevers, East Alabama gleaning coordinator for the Society of St. Andrew. "The majority of volunteers that stayed for the greatest length of time was the Wesley volunteers, as this was a mission project for them."
Approximately 42,000 pounds of sweet potatoes were in the parking lot of the Wesley Foundation, which translates into 120,000 servings of food.
"This is over 42,000 pounds of sweet potatoes that will feed a lot of hungry people," said Seevers. "By bagging and distributing, these potatoes will not go to waste."
Seevers said the packing was completed right at 4 p.m. and ready for pick-up by an East Alabama Food Bank truck.
"It was an incredible effort by all to accomplish the task," Seevers said. "The local fire department came and washed down the parking lot, and by 5 p.m. -- except for a random potato or two in the grassy area -- you would have never known that the parking lot had been full of sweet potatoes that morning. You wondered if it was all a dream."
Approximately 30,000 pounds of sweet potatoes will be going to East Alabama Food Bank and 12,000 pounds will be distributed to 24 different agencies in the local area, said event coordinator Mary Lynn Botts.
"Usually when you think of hunger, you think of starving babies in Africa," said Devin Yeomans, senior in nutrition. "It's a really sad picture. Then you kind of miss the fact that hunger exists in your own backyard."
Yeomans is a part of the Committee of 19.
During Hunger Week, a focus of the anti-hunger initiative on campus, the group participated in the Sweet Potato Drop.
Yeomans is also a co-founder of Why Care Campaign, a student-led hunger awareness campaign centered on World Food Day.
"We are really trying to get other people on campus involved, because it's really a cool thing when people come together in something like this," said Jennifer Lewis, president of the Auburn Wesley Foundation and senior in biomedical sciences.
"I think this is great awareness on how much food our country wastes without us even knowing it."
The goal of Society of St. Andrew is to keep food from wasting, salvaging food and helping hungry people.
"We recover food from farmers that are going to waste because it is too small or too large, bruised, Grade B produce," Botts said. "This produce is edible, but not sellable. We work with volunteers to recover the food and get into agencies feeding the hungry."
The society often coordinates with churches in different communities.
Botts said she met with the Auburn Wesley Foundation to see if it was interested in covering the freight cost for the potatoes to be brought from farmers in North Carolina to Auburn and participate in the Sweet Potato Drop as one of its mission projects.
"After that, we realized that Auburn loves hunger and has been the catalyst in the fight against hunger," Botts said. "We began communicating with Committee of 19, and we knew if we could time this event to be in conjunction with Auburn's Hunger Action Week, we could involve the entire Auburn campus."
Seevers said the project is vital to keeping members thinking ways they can serve people in Auburn.
"It just helps everybody focus and realize we have hungry people right here in our community," Seevers said. "It just helps us lend that helping hand and feed our brothers and sisters."
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