Dear ZAGBA Community,
As you all know, due to this unfortunate Pandemic, people have lost their jobs and small businesses are closing shop.
Families are struggling and going hungry across the world Focusing on our own state, the cities and towns in MA, esp. in the Middlesex county are suffering the most. The food pantries are running dry and struggling to get more inventory as the need at this time seems endless.
Hence in these difficult times if we as a community again come together and are able to collectively raise a decent amount in donations, ZAGBA will send in the collected donations for feeding the hungry via the meal packing through the Outreach Program. This is a very noble cause and no amount is too small or too big. Please donate generously and send your donations to ZAGBA, with a note written in Memo section: ”Covid-19 Meal Packing”
Yasmin Bhumgara, previous ZAGBA Board Member and a long-standing ZAGBA member, has through ZAGBA has held a few meal packing events in the past in collaboration with Matthew Martin from the Outreach Program, who have supplied the meals and equipments to pack them. Matthew, is the first Regional Manager and NEw England Coordinator of the Outreach Program. Some information on this organization is below:
Based in Union, IA, The Outreach Program is a non-profit 501 (c)(3) corporation that organizes food packaging events around the country. With more than 300 million meals packaged to date, the organization’s mission is to provide food, safe water, education, and medical care to those in need at home and abroad. Homepage
ZAGBA is no stranger to doing events in collaboration with the Outreach Program and Matthew Martin has coordinated all the meals and equipments. In the past ZAGBA has successfully raised large donations for meal packing events for hurricane struck areas such as Puerto Rico (Nov 2017) and the 2018 hurricane that struck North and South Carolina’s, where ZAGBA raised donations from it’s generous members and packed close to 20,000 meals (Jan 2019).
ZAGBA has also annually participated in the Harvard Meal packing events during Thanksgiving time.
Due to Covid-19 social gathering restrictions, we are looking to raise funds only and these funds will be sent to the Outreach Program, who are packing meals daily in their Pembroke Facility with the help of their amazing staff/volunteers, while maintaining all the rules of social distancing.
One meal = 0.30 cents. Each meal packet that is packed contains 6 meals, that can feed a family one time, and costs $1.80/packet.
If we raise say approx. $5000, ZAGBA can pack 16,666 meals (@.30 cents each).
Should you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to Yasmin Bhumgara at ybhumgara@gmail.com.
She will be happy to answer all your questions.
If you wish to send a donation, please use ZAGBA’s paypal to send the payment by SUNDAY MAY 10, 2020. ZAGBA will contribute to this cause and any money received from the community, will be collected and sent to Matthew Martin for the emergency meals.
The paypal information is as follows:
· Go to paypal.com and login with your paypal account.
· Choose Send or Request Money and then Send Money
· In the text box enter treasurer.zagba@gmail.com
· Enter the amount and then sending to a friend option.
· Add a note explaining # of people, kids ages etc.. if necessary
· Click Continue and choose How you want to pay. You may use a Credit card, Paypal balance or Bank debit. is better for you as you are not charged any fee in that case.
· Click next and then send payment now.
If you are unable to send the payment by paypal, we will accept a few checks but the preference is of paypal. However we would prefer that ZAGBA move to paypal in 2020. Please make checks payable to “ZAGBA” and mail them to: Pria Sarma, Treasurer, 103 Randlett Park, West Newton, MA 02465. On the memo write “The Outreach Program”.
If you have any questions and need help to start a paypal, do not hesitate to reach out to the ZAGBA board.
Thank you in advance for your generosity during these difficult times.
ZAGBA BOARD