Howard Harris has been volunteering with Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank for the last 10 years or so with his wife, Paula. They brought their two sons to volunteer when the boys were little, and when Howard retired, he decided to come back.
“When our kids were young, we were looking for a way to get them involved in the community. And the Food Bank was a place that let kids that young come. So we used to go on Saturdays with them and to give them a sense of what it meant to help people in the community,” he says.
Howard comes three mornings a week, doing a little bit of everything. A lot of his time is spent in the warehouse, but he also works at a distribution in Clairton each month, helps with any project that comes up and sometimes goes out to farms to pick up food donations.
He says the act of directly helping someone else by giving them something they need is one reason he keeps coming back, but he also appreciates the way the Food Bank supports its volunteers. He looks forward to socializing with the other volunteers.
“A lot of folks like me, many of them are retired and it’s a great opportunity to do something useful and also have a social interaction with people, which becomes more difficult as you get older,” he says.
Aside from volunteering, Howard and Paula are long-time donors. He says it was the mission of the Food Bank that brought them in, but seeing that mission in action reinforces their desire to give and to volunteer.
“I think particularly for us, the pandemic was just such a striking moment and how the food bank would adjust. And at the same time it [the food bank] was very concerned about our health,” he says. “We did a lot of the home delivery, and then when it finally began to open up again, we were able to come in and they were very, very careful about trying to keep us healthy and safe. So all that just contributed to reinforcing our sense that this is a place where we felt our time and our money was well worth it.”