Volunteers preparing vegetables for soup mix. (photo courtesy of the North Okanagan Valley Gleaners Society)

By Liam Verster

Making Soup Packets

Volunteers needed to help tackle world hunger

Jul 25, 2022 | 2:00 PM

The North Okanagan Valley Gleaners Society is seeking help to make soup packets to be distributed to people in need around the world.

The volunteers will help prepare and chop vegetables for the soup mix.

“Most [volunteers] would be coming in to help us trim vegetables, and then we dice those vegetables, and then they go on trays and into a dryer, and then that becomes one of our ingredients for our dried soup mixes,” Russel Phillips, plant manager for the North Okanagan Valley Gleaners Society, told Vernon Matters.

“This week, for example, we’re working on some cauliflower and some garlic scapes and a few potatoes, and when the onions come, we will be on those as well.”

The volunteers work half days during regular weekdays from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m.at their Lavington processing plant.

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“We do a four-hour shift, and that’s just for drying time for our vegetables. If we ran later than 12 o’clock, we’d still have wet stuff in the dryers in the morning,” said Phillips.

“So we stop at noon just to make sure the stuff is dry in the morning and that we can have empty dryers to fill.”

While most of the volunteers help chop and prep veggies, the Gleaners Society does have some volunteers doing trades work at the processing plant, and Phillips said anyone with special skills will be put to work if they want to volunteer their time.

The Gleaners Society receives about 15 per cent of it’s vegetables from local producers in the North Okanagan, and the remaining produce comes from producers as far as Manitoba, Alberta or Washington state.

Once dehydrated, the vegetables get portioned out into soup mixes, which get packaged and shipped around the globe to help address world hunger.

“We’ve sent over 4.5-million servings to Ukraine already this year, as well as Cuba and Jamaica and one is going to Guatemala shortly,” said Phillips.

“By the end of the year, we will have sent out about 9.6-million servings, just run off volunteers here.”

Phillips noted that the Gleaners Society works with non-profits around the world to ship the food, which is then provided to people in need free of charge.

Anyone who wishes to volunteer their time can call the Gleaners Society plant at 250-558-5872 or visit the organization’s website.