Burgers & Beats is a cookout-style event held at Wallace Station, and is GleanKY’s biggest annual fundraiser. In years past, it has helped us raise over 10% of our annual budget, and this year we hope to raise an even larger portion of our budget – somewhere between 15 and 20 percent. With the event just over a week away, I thought it’d be nice to give you a handful of good reasons for you to make it out this year.
1. Burgers & Beats is an opportunity for people to be together.
People are always busy – they’ve got work and kids and school and sports and family obligations and chores and errands and plenty of other things that keep their time occupied. In many ways, this is a good thing, but it can make it difficult to find time to spend meaningful time with the people who are important to you.
In my eyes, Burgers & Beats is a chance to take a break from all that for three hours. It’s a Sunday night in July away from phones and computers, without chores piling up in front of you, free from work until the next morning. You can relax, eat and drink with your family and friends, listen to some great live music, and put all those things out of mind for a little while.
2. Burgers & Beats allows us to celebrate our work and the volunteers who help us carry it out.
The work done by GleanKY – the gathering and redistribution of over 20,000 pounds of produce each month – would simply not be possible without our incredible volunteers. These are people who give freely of their time and energy to make sure that their neighbors have healthy, quality food to eat. These are people very deserving of celebration!
What’s more, it’s a chance for all these volunteers to get together and meet one another. Gleaning can be a sometimes solitary task – particularly in the winter and spring, when volunteers are mostly making solo trips to grocery stores. Burgers & Beats is a way for all these people with a shared vision to get together, to meet one another, and to celebrate the work they believe in.
3. Burgers & Beats helps us realize that there is still plenty of work to be done in reducing hunger and food waste.
While we treat Burgers & Beats largely as a celebration, it is important for us to remember the reason for the event – to support an organization working to fight hunger and food waste. We’ll have a guest speaker from one of our partner recipient sites at the event to talk about the importance of gleaned produce to the work they do.
And of course, we’ll have members of the GleanKY staff throughout the event speak – both onstage and off – about the importance of the work we do every day. You can probably even ask any of the many volunteers in attendance – they so often speak with the clients of many of our partner recipient sites, and I’m sure they’d be more than happy to get you caught up to speed!
4. Burgers & Beats helps us raise money to continue our work year-round.
At the end of the day, Burgers & Beats is a fundraiser, and our biggest one at that – it funds roughly a sixth of our work each year. Even though harvest season comes to an end each year, hunger continues year-round and our work must continue right along with it. Our volunteers now glean 364 days a year from groceries throughout Lexington and help us supply our partner recipient sites with the produce they need even when Kentucky’s fields are covered in snow.
Burgers & Beats is very important to GleanKY in many ways, and we all hope to see you there on the 17th. To get your tickets in advance (and to save $10 from the price at the event) you can click here to purchase them online. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to call (859.444.4769) or email (ben@gleanky.org) me – I look forward to seeing you there!