April Fool’s food drive key to stock supplies for poor

Monday, March 28, 2005 | 9:23 a.m.

Officials at Catholic Charities of Southern Nevada Family Services every day look at dwindling supplies in their pantry and wonder how they are going to provide nutritional food baskets for the working poor and other needy families.

Each day, about 150 families go to the facility on North Main Street -- an increase of 30 percent over last year -- to get food that is collected through individual donations and year-round food drives. The agency said there was a 10 percent increase in clients between 2003 and 2004.

The sixth annual April Foods Day drive will begin Friday at area resorts to help relieve Catholic Charities' Mother Hubbard's cupboard dilemma.

"This year, we are hopeful that we will get more food because we have 13 hotels participating, while last year we had seven," Catholic Charities spokeswoman Sharon Mann said of the weeklong drive in which hotel employees bring food to work for the agency to pick up.

Mann said the April Foods drive traditionally brings in about 10,000 pounds.

Catholic Charities receives tons of goods from about two dozen major food drives each year, Mann said.

The participating hotels for April Foods are Bally's, Caesars Palace, California, Flamingo, Fremont, Harrah's, Las Vegas Hilton, Main Street Station, MGM Grand, New York-New York, Paris Las Vegas, Sam's Town and The Palms.

The food drive is a precursor the 15th annual National Association of Letter Carriers National Food Drive -- the nation's largest one-day, non-perishable food collection -- on May 14.

The letter carriers event collects greater than 570,000 pounds of food for 18 charities, including 58,000 to 70,000 pounds for Catholic Charities.