Voice of the consumer: Brighter holidays for seniors with Silver Key

Our 11 News Call For Action team pens a weekly column for our news partner The Gazette. Previous columns can be found here.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KKTV) - Our local nonprofit needs your help to make the holidays brighter for seniors in our community. It may not be Halloween yet, but Silver Key Senior Services is working hard to make sure seniors have a plentiful Thanksgiving. The group is holding its annual Bountiful Bags food drive.

“For more than 50 years, Silver Key has been committed to making this the best community in the nation to age,” said Silver Key’s Derek Wilson. “One of the ways we do that for the Thanksgiving season is that for 26 years, we’ve been doing Bountiful Bags where we give a complete Thanksgiving meal in a bag to area seniors in need.

“Those that utilize our food pantry can get one of those bags. We can only do that through the efforts of our community partners and our community neighbors so we’re asking the community to step up and help out wherever they can, however they can, in a variety of ways.”

Silver Key’s goal is to fill 1,300 Bountiful Bags for Thanksgiving. They are in need of the following items: cranberry sauce, dessert dry mix (cookie, brownie, muffin mix, etc.), dry stuffing or dressing, instant mashed potatoes, dry gravy mix, canned green beans, cream of mushroom soup and canned yams or sweet potatoes.

“We’re seeing food inflation at a 47-year high. Folks are hurting really badly. It’s getting harder and harder to obtain the items. We have a great partnership with Care and Share, but even they are having struggles, along with supply chain and inflation costs, to get all the items we need,” said Wilson. “But if you don’t have time to shop, you can also donate monetarily. We have great, tremendous buying power; as a nonprofit, in bulk, we can save on the tax, we can get those things to put the bags together.”

You can drop off the nonperishable food items between now and Nov. 1 at the following locations: Silver Key Food Pantry at 1605 S. Murray Blvd., The Promenade Shops at Briargate, Scheels, and three King Soopers locations, including the store at 3250 Centennial Blvd., King Soopers Ridgeview Marketplace and King Soopers Marketplace at Briargate. You can find out more information at silverkey.org/bountifulbags.

More than 1,300 seniors use Silver Key’s food pantry every month. The group said the need is greater now more than ever.

“Folks are hurting. Getting their dollar to stretch at the grocery store is getting harder. Again a 47-year high for food inflation, folks are feeling that pinch. We’re seeing a new demographic come in for help like we’ve never seen before,” said Wilson. “I’m really urging folks to give whatever they can, $25 completes a bag, they get a $10 gift card from King Soopers to pick the protein of their choice.”

Click here to read the original column on gazette.com.

Copyright 2022 KKTV. All rights reserved.