The Charity Foundation Foodbank Rus and X5 Group held the annual Basket of Kindness marathon in Moscow to collect food aid. All stores of the Pyaterochka retail chain inside the Moscow Ring Road participated in the marathon. A total of 31.5 tons of food were collected during the campaign to be distributed to over 14 thousand people.
City residents could donate food with a long shelf life to single pensioners and families with children in complicated situations on December 16. They purchased food from the recommended list, including sunflower oil, cereals, tea, sugar, canned food, pasta, and sweets, and handed them over to volunteers at the checkout area.
Volunteers of Foodbank Rus packaged about 5.3 thousand sets from the collected food, 30% of which were added by X5. The first sets were delivered to charity receivers the next day: single pensioners and needy families with children from the Moscow, Vologda, Ryazan, Lipetsk, Vladimir, Kostroma, Tula, Voronezh, Bryansk, and Tver regions.
The social project Basket of Kindness was launched by X5 Group and Foodbank Rus back in 2015. As such, X5 was the first among Russian retailers to build an infrastructure for providing food aid using food drive technology and continues to develop it, enabling customers to donate food to Foodbank Rus volunteers online or directly in the store for the benefit of people in need and homeless animals. In turn, Foodbank Rus provides infrastructural support for Basket of Kindness: from collecting and packaging food by an extensive volunteer community to transporting and distributing food help through a network of its own food banks, partner NPOs, and social protection authorities.
Follow the news to learn where and when the next collection will take place. You can also sign up to participate as a volunteer to accept food donations, deliver them to the warehouse, assemble food sets, and distribute these packages to people in need.