THUNDER BAY -- A group of local chiropractors were on a mission to feed the hungry Thursday.
The Healthy Families Wellness Centre, the Port Arthur Chiropractic Clinic and the Jessiman Chiropractic Clinic joined together for the third annual Mission: Nutrition, a food drive where the doctors pick up bags of food their patients have collected to be donated to local food banks.
The Port Arthur Chiropractic Clinic started the initiative three years ago and chiropractor James DiGiuseppe has seen it grow since the beginning.
Last year the clinics collected 6,700 pounds of food and are hoping to beat that number this year.
“We’re trying to show as a chiropractic group that we can organize ourselves, get a lot more initiative and get a lot more food out to the people who need it across the city,” DiGiuseppe said Thursday at his office.
To encourage people to participate, the clinics give their patients Mission: Nutrition grocery bags to fill up and then the clinic staff picked up the bags with plans to weigh the food Thursday and Friday.
“I think it’s a really big thing because what’s happening is people see we’re making that extra effort and so they want to make that extra effort,” DiGiuseppe said. “We’re able to engage a bigger group of patients to help us, so we were able to collect that much more food.”
Leila Coulter, a chiropractor at the Healthy Families Wellness Centre, said they saw the Mission as an opportunity to help people.
“So many families in our community were hit so hard this year, especially with the flooding. We thought we’d try to help out and get some food for the food banks,” she said, adding their goal is to collect 2,000 pounds of food.
Coulter also believes they are able to collect more food by offering to pick up the bags from people’s homes.
“Everybody wants to help out but people kind of forget or get too busy, so this way we figured if we would sign people up and go to their homes and pick up the food, that way we’d probably get a better response,” she said.
The total weight of food will be known by Friday.
