Almost There

Dropped off 750 cans worth of food last night at Gangplank…



…and @edaz matched it the next day!

First 400 cans dropped off

I dropped off the first load of cans from my pledge. I’ll be attributing these to the first 200 people who retweeted my challenge back in April. I also donated some coffee and 12 jars of peanut butter, a food that is always in shortage at St. Mary’s Food Bank.

Today the charity retweet is at 863, or 1,726 cans. I’ve had a few tips on local deals for canned food and an offer to donate via PayPal. Thank you to everyone who has brought awareness to the issue: food donations are down, but the demand has gone up.

Counting donation requests

Some of you have asked how I go about counting all the ReTweet’s about my donation offer on Twitter. It’s pretty simple: I look at mentions of my username, count a couple pages worth at a time while favoriting each one. The next time I go to count, I just find the last one that wasn’t favorited.

Last count before this post: 742, or 1484 cans I’ve got to come up with!

Being a web developer, I know I could just use the Twitter API and some minimal coding to automate this, but there’s something about workload and just now getting my taxes done that’s keeping from doing that.

I’m all in

How do I explain why I committed to donating up to 1 ton of canned food to St. Mary’s Phoenix Food Bank by August 1st? I think the best way is to say: its not really that hard.

If I make the effort over the next few months to collecting cans instead of spending time watching television and surfing the web, I’ll come up with plenty of creative ways to get the food. Meanwhile, I encourage others out there to step up and make the same kind of comittment in their community. You can start with just two cans like I did:

Thanks to the Twitter community (#phxfooddrive) and Gangplank for inspiring me to do something helpful with my time.