Your empties help make a difference! Erica Bruck has been spearheading our can and bottle collecting for the past few years. She has organized getting cans and bottles donated and also taking them in for redemption. COVID-19 threw her a curveball because the redemption center was closed for a time and that meant finding somewhere to store all the bags of cans until the center opened again. Can donation seems like a small easy thing but when you do it on a big scale, there are all kinds of work involved and we thank Erica for her continuing efforts. When all the cans were turned in we realized a return of more than $5,000! That will especially come in handy this year because we’re not able to hold our big fundraiser because of the pandemic but we still have bills to pay.
Erica did not accomplish this alone. She reached out and enlisted the help of several people:
Daryl and Shannon Studt allowed us the use of their barn for storage over the last four months. This was a game-changer for us.
Ken White, Angie Brunner and Jennifer Evans ran all over the corridor picking up donations. Also, a big thank you goes to Ken for taking multiple loads to the Can Shed when they reopened and for keeping careful track of our earnings.
Dot Sheldon made multiple runs to Fareway in Cedar Rapids for empty Can Shed bags and running them down to Erica in Solon. She also managed the big task of tracking glass counts as they loaded and added them up afterwards. That was no easy task!
Darcy McGuire and Anthony Manning slaved away in the heat doing anything that was asked of them (counting glass, tracking types of bags as they were loaded, hoisting bags into the trailer, etc).
Mindy Tearse made dozens of trips to Can Shed over the last two years before the quarantine made it necessary to store the donations.
And, of course, a huge THANK YOU goes out to everyone who donated their empty cans and bottles. None of this would have been possible without you!
Thanks to Erica and her team of volunteers for doing all this work for the animals. It’s really going to make a difference, this year especially.
