UPDATED Friday, November 21, 2008 --- 8:25 a.m.

The Goodman Community Center needs your help
providing Thanksgiving “Baskets” for 1000 Dane County families

If you can help, please bring food – now.

It’s always been important. Now it’s urgent.

The Goodman Community Center has 1,000 families across Dane County expecting to receive all the fixings to make a traditional Thanksgiving Meal to share with their families. Volunteers are ready to begin packing the “baskets,” and we are still short. Could you, your family, business or organization help? Volunteers are abundant. Food or money to buy food is what is most needed.

What is needed:

29 Frozen turkeys

1140 Cans of vegetables

1683 Cans of fruit

637 Cans of cranberry sauce

821 Disposable roaster pans

699 Cans of pumpkin pie mix

670 Cans of evaporated milk

747 Jiffy pie crust mix boxes

772 Aluminum pie tins

Bring donations to the Goodman Community Center Gym at 149 Waubesa St. from 9am-7pm tonight,
or 9am-3pm on Saturday. If those hours don’t work, our main reception desk is open 6 am – 8 pm tonight and from 8:30am -5:00pm Saturday. Sunday volunteers will be packing baskets from noon-4pm in our gym and would still accept any donations. Please bring any turkeys on Monday when we have a Schoeps truck to store them in.

Donate online at www.goodmancenter.org. All online gifts given through Thanksgiving will automatically be designated for Thanksgiving baskets and food needs unless requested otherwise.

Thanks for giving.

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Posted Thursday, November 20, 2008 --- 4:45 p.m.

Thousands of donations are still needed to put together Thanksgiving dinner baskets for families in need, in Dane County. As NBC 15's Michelle Riell discovered, it could mean the difference between a Thanksgiving meal or just another day for hundreds of families.

By looking around the Goodman gym, it's easy to see thousands of donations are still needed. Marlene Storms who is organizing the Thanksgiving basket drive says, "That little small heap is all we have for canned fruit, so you can see we need lots more, I think we need about 1500 more cans."

The center is also short nearly 1700 cans of vegetables, 900 roasting tins and nearly 900 pie tins, among other fixings that will help make up a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. Storms says, "Here is cranberry sauce, and we still need 769 cans of cranberry sauce... this is the pie crust mix and we still need 854 of those, pumpkin pie we still need 800."

The Center will provide meals for 1,000 families and roughly 7,000 people in Dane County, the same number as in years past.

It's a need people like Arlene Torres are helping to meet. Torres is dropping off donations she and her co-workers at Tech Systems have made over the last several days. Torres says, "The goal was to have 2 baskets, and from there you know any cash donations would be extra, and we ended up donating about 16 baskets and donated about $261 in cash."

Leigh Ellen Caro-Leverich owns Elmside Children's School. She holds a food drive every Thanksgiving. This year they collected 141 food donations. Caro-Leverich says, "It's kind of an important message for children to learn that not everybody has food on their table... by collecting this and bringing it here makes it very tangible, very real."

And gives all 1,000 families a very real chance that enough donations will make up Thanksgiving dinner.

The Goodman Center has met its goal for stuffing and Jello with the help of Kraft foods. Dejope gaming also donated 200 turkeys to help them meet their goal of one thousand. But, as we mentioned, other canned food items are still needed. You can drop off donations through Saturday or make a donation online, just log onto http://www.atwoodcc.org/.