President Andrzej Duda and his wife Agata Kornhauser-Duda on Tuesday attended an event in Warsaw to kick off the annual Christmas Food Collection campaign, which is run by the country’s food banks and is now in its 23rd year.
During the event, Duda addressed an audience of volunteers, food bank employees and businesspeople supporting the drive.
He said that a readiness to help others and “do good to people” was “something very deeply rooted in our identity, in our culture,” a part of Polish tradition for centuries.
Public broadcaster Polish Radio is a media partner of the campaign, in which volunteers encourage customers in retail outlets around the country to share their purchases with poor people.
This year an army of more than 53,000 volunteers is expected to be deployed to more than 3,300 stores in 550 cities nationwide on the weekend of November 29-30, according to the bankizywnosci.pl website.
Meanwhile, the Share a Meal with the Homeless campaign, another food collection initiative aiming to help the needy in Poland, has drawn increasing interest from the public since it was launched in 2015, according to the effort’s coordinator, Maria Skołożyńska.
That campaign sees volunteers coming to people’s homes to pick up food left over after Christmas and Easter and taking it to soup kitchens and eateries for the poor and homeless, public broadcaster Polish Radio’s IAR news agency has reported.
The average Polish family of four wastes up to PLN 2,500 (EUR 577, USD 655) worth of food annually, according to the Federation of Polish Food Banks.
(gs/pk)
Source: president.pl, bankizywnosci.pl