Despite the turmoil in the world there are still those who are stepping up to help the community. During this season of giving, local families and businesses found ways to get food into the hands of those who needed it the most and they did it without expecting anything in return.

“My husband and I just felt with everything that’s been happening lately we were just compelled to help what we could using the money that we have,” said Talli Maldonado. “So ideally we just wanted to help maybe one or two families this season. We live in Herriman so I posted on my Facebook asking if anybody knew of someone who maybe needed some assistance with groceries or a Thanksgiving dinner to let me know. My husband and I would love to help.”

Bryan Beard and his children Rylee, 9 (left) and Rhett, 13 hold a few of the items collected by Jay’s Tire Pros for the Bountiful Food Bank in front of the custom truck the company built. (Photo by Rad Thornberry)

 Maldonado said the responses she received were just insane. “It was overwhelming. I had a lot of people who knew families. So I just decided to build a nomination form where people could go and nominate their families or people that they know, how many kids and where they’re located. I received a ton of responses so we were able to lock in 13 families.”

They were all within the Salt Lake Valley, she said. “We raised $2,000 in four days. We provided a Thanksgiving dinner to all 13 families and then also we were be able to provide a gift card for groceries as well to all 13.”

Maldonado was set to deliver the food on Nov. 24 just in time for Thanksgiving. “It’s been awesome. It was just something I wanted to do to give our community the opportunity to show up for others and I’ve been very surprised at how many people donated. It’s just awesome.”

“When this whole SNAP thing came out I read articles in the Deseret News and on KSL,” said Truman Ta. “My wife and I sat down and we figured there’s got to be something we can do. You know the church is helping with food and the food bank is helping. They’re great organizations but we also wanted to contribute as well.”

Ta’s wife is a veterinarian at Wasatch Community Clinic (WCC) in Salt Lake and the clinic shares space with Ruff Haven. “It’s a nonprofit organization,” he said. “They typically help people who are incarcerated but they have pets and they don’t know what to do with their pets so they’ll (Ruff Haven) actually take care of them while they’re in a situation where they can’t help their own pets.”

They get donated food from places around the valley and they will donate pet food on top of that, said Ta. “With Ruff Haven’s food donation of pet food we decided to do a human food type of thing. I work at Guru Technologies in Layton. I talked about it with our executive leadership team and we agreed that it’d be a good idea to put something together and have our team see if they wanted to donate to this cause.”

Ta said he also owns Tsunami Restaurant and Sushi Bar. “We get discounted food on things like bulk rice and whatnot, so they also contributed to the cause as well. So, we just kind of cobbled this thing all together in a matter of a short amount of time.”

They were committed to doing 1,600 bags of food no matter what, he said. “If we could get donations to help with the cost then that would have been great but most of the money was coming out of WCC.”

Ta created a GoFundMe project to raise funds. “We raised $1,650 in cash donations,” he said. “Our goal was $3,400 but we just thought if we could get half of that it would be awesome and that’s what happened.”

A lot of the engineers at Guru donated, said Ta. “The president donated on behalf of the company. One hundred percent goes directly to the cause. We wanted to make sure 100% of the donations went to the food.”

Kindex, a company in Kaysville, also donated a lot of potatoes as well, he said. “The CEO found out about what we were doing and he said, ‘I’d love to donate as well. You know I just happen to have access to 9,000 pounds of potatoes. I have about 800 left if you want them.’ I said ‘absolutely.’”

Ta held eight food drives in November before Thanksgiving.