With less than two weeks to go, St. Mary’s Food Bank says it's more than 9,000 birds short of its 24,000 turkey goal for the Thanksgiving holiday.
Brown says St. Mary’s has started giving out holiday meals in different regions of Arizona.
“We're already distributing up on the tribal lands this week. We'll be back down in Phoenix for the last three days before Thanksgiving. And we still need more than 9,000 turkeys. We do have some organizations out there that are doing turkey drives for us, but it's really going to come down to individual people donating turkeys to help families," he said.
St. Mary’s spokesperson Jerry Brown says the organization has not spent much time working on Thanksgiving meal operations due to ongoing community needs, which increased with the government shutdown and SNAP benefit cuts.
“I would say that everything we've been through the last couple of weeks with SNAP benefits being cut and the government shut down, we've been putting out a tremendous effort just to make sure that we feed people that need it on a daily basis," he said.
Brown says people can still support the drive by bringing turkeys and other food supplies to St. Mary’s locations and making monetary donations.
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