JUNE 27TH MIRACLE PROJECT Community Comes Together In World’s Largest Food Drive
STORY BY MICHAEL SEGUIN Top: The June 27th Miracle Project collected a staggering 2,020,500 pounds of food. Above: Organizing Committee members Matt Hernandez, Joshua Lane, Josh Spadafora, Adam Lally, Mark Jones and Steve Truant.
“We were all drawn to the underlying mission,” Matt explains. “There’s so much negativity and hardship going around right now with the pandemic. Ultimately, we wanted to provide something that the community could just catalyze around. It’s all about positivity, unity and community. It gives everybody something powerful to focus on. It gets everybody involved. It gets everybody together.” Together, the team of volunteers embarked on a rigorous month-long planning process. The team ended up coordinating 30 different drop-off points and 10 different collection hubs. “What we asked people to do is really simple,” Matt explains. “We asked our neighbours to just leave a non-perishable food item on
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THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC HAS PLACED a significant strain on all of us. However, one of the virus’s most unfortunate casualties was our community’s food banks. Due to our current economic situation, many more people than normal have been forced to rely on food donations. And with dwindling supplies and increasingly barren shelves, Windsor and Essex County needed a miracle. In response, residents, community leaders and local businesses came together to participate in the June 27th Miracle Project—the largest community-wide grassroots food drive in the world. “The project originated in my hometown,” Matt Hernandez, a member of the Organizing Committee, explains. “On May 16th, Chatham hosted their own Miracle Project. It was their brainchild. After seeing the phenomenal success they had, a couple of us got together and said, ‘Hey, why don’t we do that here?’” Matt, a Real Estate Investor and entrepreneur, was asked to participate in the event by his old friend Josh Lane. “Josh and I are both originally from Chatham-Kent,” Matt states. “He sent me a text saying, ‘Hey! You heard about that thing we did in Chatham? We want to bring it here.’ I was intrigued and told him to give me a call. We ended up talking from 11 at night until the early hours of morning.” From there, Matt joined the June 27th Miracle Project. The Organizing Committee is made up of nine other individuals, including Josh Lane, Steve Desjardins, Adam Lally, Steve Truant, Kerri Zold, Tracey Bailey, Steve Ilijanich, Mark Jones and Josh Spadafora.
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