As Fred Tazartes exited the Sam’s Club located on Carl Boyer Drive, he reached into his cart and handed off some food to representatives of the Santa Clarita Valley Corvette Club to be donated to those in need.
Tazartes said he works for a local nonprofit that helps foster youth facing food insecurity and said he knows, firsthand, a little can go a long way.
“I can tell you, the faces of the people I’ve seen, it’s amazing. It makes a difference,” said Tazartes. “To me, a jar of peanut butter is nothing. To them, it’s a big difference.”
Tazartes was one of several people who handed off food to the Corvette Club as they exited the grocery store at Saturday’s food drive – some even donating entire carts.
“It’s amazing how generous people can be, you don’t realize it until you come out here and do one of these food pantry things. People respond,” said Jim Webster, vice president of the Corvette Club. “It’s amazing, people donate toothpaste, toothbrushes, peanut butter – you know all these non-perishable things. We have a little list that we hand out to people, of things people really need so that when they’re inside the store, they know the kinds of things that we’d like to have in the basket.”
The event was done in coordination with the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank and the SCV Food Pantry, which will help distribute the food locally. James Espinoza, executive director for the SCV Food Pantry, said these events are usually pretty successful – filling up two to three vans’ worth of food.
“We usually get about two to three truckloads of these vans… On average, the food pantry serves about 50 families a day, five days a week,” said Espinoza. “These families vary from seniors, small families, large families, some of our non-housed neighbors as well… We’re fighting food insecurity all year round, people are hungry all year round. You can’t feed them once and be (done), so we have consecutive food drives like this and partnerships with the Corvette Club and other various clubs and churches and organizations.”
To help entice shoppers to come and check out the food drive, the club of course brought its wheels with them. There were several Corvettes scattered throughout the parking lot – but two were on display next to the food trucks: a 2019 C7 Stingray in ceramic matrix gray metallic (one of only 1,500 produced) and a blue C7 convertible.
