MetroWest Medical Center teams are donating over 800 boxes of cereal and healthy breakfast items to area food pantries this month in the hospital’s annual Healthy Over Hungry Cereal Drive.
Employees, who competed on teams, collected 812 items to provide families struggling with food insecurity healthy breakfast options this summer. The donations will be delivered to the Framingham and Natick food pantries.
Mary Oster, Director of IRB Services at MetroWest Medical Center, was on the winning team that collected 602 boxes of cereal this year. She says employees were inspired to double their efforts after talking with parents when they delivered cereal to a local food pantry last year.
“A couple of the parents came up…they just said thank you, this is just really important to us,” she says. “Not everyone feels comfortable talking about what they can and can’t do for their kids economically, so when they come up and they’re like thank you…that stuck with us as moms and parents.”
Tenet Healthcare’s Healthy Over Hungry initiative was launched in 2010 to help families who were losing access to school-based nutrition programs during the summer months. Since 2014, more than 22 million servings of cereal have been donated and $1.3 million has been raised company wide.
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