IONIA, Mich. (WOOD) — Aaron Wiliford and his classmates in Ionia High School’s TV production class were excited to take advantage of the opportunity to try their hand at television journalism as part of the WOOD TV8 Football Frenzy Tailgate Food Drive.

Zion Church of Ionia will benefit from the food drive this week. The team of students, including Wiliford, visited the pantry to better understand its mission, speaking with volunteers Deb and Owen Hall.

Deb Hall said one recent client is a grandmother whose daughter and five grandchildren have been staying with her.

“She didn’t have a vehicle most of the time so she would walk down a big hill to get to us. One day, she had a baby stroller loaded with all the food we gave her and she was trying to push it up that big hill to get it home,” Deb Hall recalled.

Owen Hall said the pantry was launched in 1987.

“It’s been going continuously since then, except for one time and it did run out of money and had to close down for a month,” Owen Hall said.

Discovering that the pantry had run out of food and money before reinforced the students’ understanding of how important food drives like the one they contributed to can be for small pantries. 

The Ionia Affiliated Athletic Boosters presented the Zion food pantry with a $1,200 check. That money, plus the 2,450 pounds of food donated by Ionia students, that works out to about 9,950 pounds of food for Zion.

“It was spectacular. In the history of Football Frenzy, we’ve never had an athletic booster provide $1,200,” Pattijean McCahill with Feeding America West Michigan said. “(The food pantry) can space (using the money) out throughout the course of the year.”

“It means a lot for the pantry because we have so many people that we’re feeding and the food flies off our shelves very quickly, so it takes a lot of money to replace it. And we appreciate it very much,” Deb Hall said Friday morning.