MELROSE — The Food Drive will host their fourth annual Harvest Fall Foodie Fundraiser on Saturday, November 8 from 6 to 9 p.m. at Memorial Hall in Melrose. The event will feature tasting stations from Melrose food establishments Big Fin Poke, Bobby C’s Ristorante, Buckalew’s, The Kitchen, Melrose Farmer’s Market vendor Guru the Caterer, Ocean Sushi, T’ahpas 529 and Turner’s Seafood; dessert from Fabian’s European Pastries and Sweet Spot Bakery; festive autumn cocktails served by local volunteer bartenders; live jazz featuring renowned Berklee bassist and Melrose resident Bruce Gertz and a spirited and unique silent auction and raffle. Tickets are available on The Food Drive’s website at thefooddrive.org. Proceeds from the event will sustain The Food Drive’s hunger relief and food rescue work in Melrose and surrounding cities.
The evening will feature the second annual Harvest Hero Award to be presented to Melrose resident Ed Butts. The Food Drive’s board established the annual award to honor a person or organization for extraordinary commitment to the organization’s mission.
“Who completely personifies the incredible service of our volunteers? Why of course, it’s Ed Butts. Since Tony and I first met Ed, he’s given his heart and hands and time and energy to help us feed our neighbors,” said Executive Director Jana Gimenez. “That’s why it’s so wonderfully fitting that our Harvest Hero Presenting Sponsor is the Melrose Cooperative Bank Foundation this year. Ed was one of our first volunteers and Melrose Cooperative was one of our very first foundation sponsors. Both believed in the work of The Food Drive from the beginning.”
Butts, a Melrose resident for 33 years and senior account executive at General Mills has been a regular face in the local volunteer community since his three daughters, now adults and college students, were in the city’s schools. After decades of donating his time to youth soccer, girls’ lacrosse and various school fundraising events, Butts answered an early call for volunteer drivers in 2020 from The Food Drive’s co-founders Jana and Tony Gimenez. The Gimenez family started The Food Drive as an experiment during the pandemic in 2020 and the organization has since distributed 925,000 pounds of food in ten communities.
“It intrigued me because the kids were getting older and in college. I had some time,” Butts explained.
Before long, Butts and his Honda Odyssey were regular parts of the still-fledging Food Drive volunteer rotation with Butts filling his “expando van” to capacity with fresh produce, prepared meals and pantry staples picked up from local grocery stores and delivering it to the Everett Grace Food Pantry where people wait in line for hours on Saturday mornings for much-needed food.
“After weeks of doing that, I found I had more capacity and more time to give, so I would park the van, walk back to Grace Food Pantry and volunteer,” Butts explained.
This was no surprise to Jana Gimenez, who shared that “Ed is a full-circle volunteer.”
In the five years since he started delivering food to the pantry, Butts has become a regular fixture on Saturday mornings in Everett, taking out trash, organizing other deliveries and helping those who attend the food distribution carry their bags up the long, steep driveway from the pantry. Butts says that those side-by-side walks remind him of The Food Drive itself.
“Jana and Tony built The Food Drive one step at a time,” Butts says. “So Saturday mornings, for me, is 47 steps. Helping someone get bags of groceries up that steep driveway, it’s 47 steps to get up.”
For Butts, his volunteer experiences with The Food Drive have become far more than just the logistics of food delivery. They have become revelations about the power of need, dignity and what community members can achieve when they recognize the humanity of those who live near them, regardless of city boundaries or language barriers.
“When you volunteer, you’re in the present. It is just an amazing thing,” Butts explains. “People in the food line, they don’t want to be there. They’re proud people. They’re just in a situation at this time of their life or at this time of the month, when they need someone else.”
That need, Butts says, is what The Food Drive manages to meet at the most basic level.
“People are not waiting two hours in 30-degree weather because they want to be there, they need to be there,” Butts states, noting that tacking food insecurity comes in different forms for The Food Drive. “The ability of the Food Drive is to help through donations, though volunteering or just making a meal for people that need it.”
For those currently considering volunteering for The Food Drive, Butts encourages them to think of the different forms, short-term and long-term, that such volunteering can take. He points out one of his favorite quotes which he believes summarizes the essence of helping out in a community.
“ ‘Good people do good things.’ So you try to be a good person and help out in any capacity you can. Whether it’s volunteering to drive food, sending in a nice-sized check or giving a buck. That makes a society.”
Butts recognizes how that same society is suffering in many ways, as food insecurity continues to be on the rise in Melrose and surrounding communities. He points to the suddenness in which many families can find themselves facing a shortage of food at home. For Butts, the gradual expansion of The Food Drive’s services over the past five years including the Community Freezer program which provides locally prepare meals to those who need it every Sunday morning at First United Methodist Church of Melrose reflects the organization’s commitment to responding to this unpredictability.
When he steps up to receive his Harvest Hero award on November 8, Butts knows he will keep The Food Drive’s mission and all those who work to further it at the front of his mind.
“It’s kind of embarrassing to get an honor like this, because I’m just one of 150 volunteers. I’m going to accept the award for all the volunteers. It takes Ed Butts and 149 other people doing their part,” Butts says.
As The Food Drive prepares to honor its five years of service to local communities, Butts is hopeful yet pragmatic about the future.
“Five years from now, it would be great to have a party celebrating zero deliveries, zero meals prepared, zero food pantries in town and the surrounding communities. But we know that’s not reality,” Butts says. “But five years from now, we’ll be continuing to do the good work with the help of Tony and Jana, The Food Drive’s Board of Directors and the volunteers, along with all the sponsors who help us out.”
Volunteering, Butts states, is simple. “There’s no right or wrong. How do you help people? One person at a time.”