Starving Students Delivers 34,800 Pounds of Food for SOVA’s Biggest Food Drive of the Year

Starving Students Delivers 34,800 Pounds of Food for SOVA’s Biggest Food Drive of the Year

San Fernando Valley, October 18, 2006: Starving Students, the nation’s leading local mover, volunteered its movers and trucks for the SOVA Community Food & Resource Program’s High Holiday Food Drive. This is the organization’s biggest food drive of the year, and over four days Starving Students picked up 34,800 pounds of donated groceries from 19 Jewish temples.
Starving Students mover Evan Howard takes a deep breath before moving the mountain of brown bags donated by Temple Aliyah. Beginning October 3, six Starving Students movers and two trucks helped pick up and deliver donated groceries to the SOVA warehouse where they would be distributed to families in need. The movers traveled throughout Los Angeles County and San Fernando Valley and loaded more than 29 pallets of groceries into their trucks. The food was collected from the temples’ congregation in observance of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Mountains of brown paper bags filled with an assortment of foods met the Starving Students movers, who could not help but look astonished at the piles of grocery bags waiting for them at the various temples. Suddenly 26 foot moving trucks, that fit an entire family’s furnishings, became too small for the countless bags of food donations. The Starving Students movers loaded the groceries into 4 feet tall containers set on pallets in the trucks. Before half the day was over, the trucks were packed to the brim and had to return to the SOVA warehouse for drop off. “This morning we filled up nine huge containers and had to drop off the food and this was only after picking up from two temples!” said veteran driver Tobias Gallegos of the first day. Each pallet weighed an average 1,200 pounds. Back at the SOVA warehouse, a forklift moved the half ton pallets to where they would be sorted into categories ranging from baby foods to pastas, snacks, canned soups, juices, etc.

The High Holiday Food Drive is SOVA’s largest food drive of the year and will provide enough food for the pantry for six months, enough to feed families through spring of next year. Each month SOVA provides groceries to over 3,900 people. Fifty percent of the food SOVA distributes comes from their food drives including the High Holiday Food Drive.
Starving Students movers enter a grocery-filled room at Temple Judea. A month before each food drive, SOVA distributes flyers to local synagogues. The flyers announce the food drive, suggests a list of what to buy to donate, and when to return to the temples with their filled bags. For the High Holiday Food Drive, most of the temples staple the flyers onto brown grocery bags and place them on the congregation seats. The rabbis make an announcement on Rosh Hashanah to fill the bags and return with them full on Yom Kippur. After all the donations are collected, Starving Students picks them up and delivers them to the SOVA warehouse.


“Starving Students has been helping SOVA with our food drives for the past three years and every year I’m impressed with their speed and efficiency. Their contribution makes a big difference!” comments Maxine Meyer, Resource Development Specialist for SOVA.

A forklift carries the half-ton pallets of food from a Starving Students truck into the SOVA warehouse. SOVA, a nonsectarian program of the Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles, operates three food pantry and resource center facilities in the Beverly-Fairfax area, West Los Angeles, and San Fernando Valley. Each center offers free groceries and supportive services to people whose limited incomes make it difficult to provide adequate, healthy food for themselves and family members. Anyone in need is welcome at the SOVA site nearest them.

“This is a charitable act that requires heavy lifting, so we’re just the guys to do it,” says Bear Barnes, Starving Students’ CEO.

Starving Students is the nation’s leading local mover, taking care of more than 1,000 families each week. Starving Students has been in business since 1973 and today employs over 1,000 movers in 9 states doing local and long distance moves.

For more information about SOVA, please contact Maxine Meyer at (818) 988-7682.
For more information about Starving Students, please contact Megan Long at (800) 441-6683.