Think Thanksgiving in This Heat, and Help The Community

Up for auction right now, furniture, restaurant gift certificates, art, sports items, and a lot more. And your bid helps provide Thanksgiving for low-income Mainers.

Food and Medicine is a community organization, nonprofit, that helps low-income citizens deal with poverty through education and empowers them with life skills.

They have more than 400 members and hundreds of volunteers to do what they do. In their effort to bring the community together, they touch hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of people every year.  They assist lower-income people with projects like getting registered to vote, and collective gardens are operated.

One of their ongoing projects is their Solidarity Harvest program that distributes Thanksgiving baskets each Thanksgiving. They raise money so that they can buy the food from Maine farmers and do about 1,400 baskets every year. Those baskets go to agencies that distribute them mostly in the Bangor area, but also in each county in Maine.

Each Thanksgiving basket will contain a turkey which is donated by Penquis, and also fresh food -- 30 pounds of fresh food. Vegetables for the thanksgiving table. And no canned goods.

To raise the money to do this good work, they hold an annual Solidarity Harvest auction, and 2021 is their 19^th annual. The auction is online and closes on Monday at 5 PM Here’s the link to the Food and Medicine Facebook page for the auction.

Well worth a scroll through the auction items as there is a vast variety of things for sale.

Melissa Smith is Office Manager for Food and Medicine and says

“Remember the auction closes Monday afternoon, and there are lurkers who wait until the last minute to submit bids, so if you see something by all means bid, but check back before Monday at 5 p.m. to check on your bid”

Does anyone want to come over and play air hockey?