Organize a Food Drive
Food drives bring in more than hundreds of thousands of pounds of food a year to the Burlington Food Bank. Together dozens of communities organize events, gather food, and deliver it to us to distribute among our clients. It’s these incredible efforts from members of our community that help us to feed our neighbours.
Register Your Event
Food and fund drives provide the Burlington Food Bank with the necessary resources to sustain our programs and ensure that a supply of emergency food is available to those who may need it.
If you would like to organize a Food Drive on behalf of the Burlington Food Bank, we would encourage you to start by registering your event. This helps us to coordinate the physical resources, food pick ups if needed, and social media coverage to help you promote your event.
Event Tool Kit
We encourage you to run your own event in support of the Burlington Food Bank, and are happy to provide you with materials to help. Note: we would love to see how you use our logo and other images, so please send any collateral you have created to j.williams@burlingtonfoodbank.ca
Ten Most Needed Items
The Burlington Food Bank provides fresh and non-perishable food, as well as supplies such as diapers, toiletries, and cleaning supplies to its own clients and to over 20 emergency food programs across the city. This is our current list of most needed items:
Cereal (Hot and Cold)
Large Soup
Juice (Boxes and 1 Litres)
Granola Bars (Peanut Free)
Peanut Butter
Crackers
Canned Fruit
Canned Tomatoes
Canned Vegetables
Canned Meat
How to Run a Successful Community Event
1. Decide where and when you’re going to run your food drive.
2. Set goals for your event, decide how you will collect the food and how you will get it to our warehouse.
- Set a goal in pounds, or aim to fill a lobby, lunchroom, office or corporate vehicle.
- Generating 100% participation is a goal. Your event can be a great team-building activity!
- We recommend that you help educate your donors to check expiry dates and to sort the food in designated boxes that we provide. This way your donors can see what items are needed most.
- We can only pick up collections greater than 300 pounds, that’s about 30 grocery bags, but we always appreciate collections being dropped off at our warehouse or a local fire station.
3. Promote your community event.
- Encourage people to donate our Most Needed Food Items.
- Tell people about your drive including: co-workers, neighbours and schoolmates.
- For corporate events, find out if your company will match food/monetary donations.
- Use facts about Burlington Food Bank to promote your drive by visiting the ‘Learn’ page.
- Advertise your drive on Facebook, Twitter or other social media sites. Be sure to tag us in your posts.
- Let us know about your event so can post about it on our website and social media.
- Send a description of your event (including who, what, where, when, contact information and a link to your website, if applicable), at least two weeks before the event. We’ll post it on our website and social media.
- Send us photos or video from this a previous event.
- Your description and formatting may be edited in order for it to fit our requirements.
- Track your success, send out emails and post updates to keep everyone excited and involved.Drop off your food and fund raising donations at:
4. Drop off your food and fund raising donations.
Please bring your donations to:
1254 Plains Rd East, Unit 1A
Burlington, ON L7S 1W6
Or, if you requested a specific pick-up date on your registration form, you can expect the truck that day. If there are conflicts, we can make other arrangements. Please note that financial donations CANNOT be dropped at fire halls. Bring them to our Plains Road location.
5. Follow up with your event participants and donors.
- Let everyone know about your success, either in an email, poster or announcement.
- After we receive your donation, a thank you letter or certificate will be sent to the event organizer. We encourage you to duplicate this letter to send it to your donors.
- Contact the Burlington Post and Burlington Today and encourage them to cover the success of your event.
- The more innovative and creative your event is will determine media interest.
Upcoming Events
If you would like to see your event listed here, please email with all of the event details, web links, and any promotional images or photos for us to use. We will also post events to our social media channels.
FEEDING OUR COMMUNITY TOGETHER Hunger Action Month is a nationwide initiative that takes place each September, uniting communities, organizations, and individuals in a powerful movement
First Annual Event in support of the Burlington Food Bank
September 24 to October 1, 2023
Join us to help families in our community who are in need of support this holiday season. There will be holiday-themed entertainment and a few surprises!
From December 1st to December 16th, 2022 Cornerstone Physiotherapy will be collecting donations on behalf of the Burlington Food Bank.
From December 1st to December 31st, 2022 AIM Recycling Burlington (aim-recycling.com) will be collecting donations on behalf of the Burlington Food Bank. you can follow them on Facebook (@AIMRecyclingBurlington) for more updates.
In the spirit of giving and investing in community health and wellness, FirstOntario Credit Union is delivering donations totalling more than $135,000 to local food banks before the end of the year. FirstOntario employees are also gearing up to provide an extra ‘Blue Wave’ of volunteer support to help many of these organizations through the holidays.
