Great Food Drive Shows Catalonia’s Social Commitment

On the last weekend of November 2013, many Catalans visited more than 1,800 markets and supermarkets all over the country and, once again, massively donated a variety of foods to help in the sustenance of needy families as well as the jobless and homeless. Since 2009, this massive campaign, known as the Gran Recapte (Great Food Collection) has been promoted and organized every year by a charity, the Catalan Food Bank (Banc dels Aliments), whose goal is to collect vast amounts of long shelf-life foods (such as preserved foods, rice, dried beans and olive oil) in order to distribute them to the poor and families at risk of malnutrition.

Beside the great number of donations, the most valuable help in this campaign, is that of over 20,000 volunteers from 240 towns, who are responsible first of gathering and classifying all the food and then, later on, will have to help to distribute them. Of course, they do it all unpaid and altruistically.  In 2009, their first year, they succeeded in collecting 200 tonnes of food, yet last year (2012) they managed to collect 2,700 tonnes, since many Catalan businesses and organizations are now also involved and support the Gran Recapte by lending them their premises, facilities and so on.

This huge wave of solidarity raised by the Great Food Collection is eventually channelled by 700 entities which collaborate in the distribution of all the foods collected to the 250,000 Catalans who really need them. Therefore, this initiative of the Catalan Food Bank has really become a conspicuous token of the great capacity of mobilization and the altruistic spirit of Catalan society.

Marcel Tarazona
Help Catalonia

Spanish