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Pillar 01 · Healthcare + Pillar 04 · Member Services · Active · ongoing

Food Drive .

Rice, garri, beans, palm oil, dried fish, infant formula. Staples that fill the kitchen when the river is high or the harvest is short.

§ 01 · The Drive

Why food drive?

The Food Drive is the oldest of our community drives. It started as Region-by-Region fundraisers — Houston, Dallas, Chicago, NY/NJ — pooling money for non-perishables and shipping containers home to Iwere Land. Convention 2026 ratifies it as a Congress-wide program with a single coordinated cycle each year and an emergency-response track for floods and fuel shocks.

Every cycle has a published manifest: how many bags of rice, how many liters of palm oil, what village received what, signed off by the Niger-Delta-side Region partner. No goods leave without a receiving signature.

The numbers that make this drive matter

  • Diaspora wages travel further than diaspora dollars: $1 in Warri buys roughly 4× what it buys in Houston for staple food.
  • The riverine communities — Ureju, Ogheye, Ogidigben, Ogbinbiri — are physically isolated when fuel prices spike or floods cut roads.
  • A single 40-foot container can stock 200+ households for a month at a delivered cost of around $18,000.
§ 02 · What goes in

The manifest.

Rice (50 kg bags)
Local sourcing in Warri preferred over shipping
Garri (white & yellow)
10 kg sacks · cassava-based staple
Beans · honey beans
Long shelf-life, protein-dense
Palm oil (5 L jugs)
Sourced from Sapele palm belt where possible
Dried fish · stockfish
Riverine staple · shipped from US ethnic markets
Infant formula · cereal
Targeted to households with under-2s
Cooking salt · seasoning
Maggi cubes, dried pepper, locust bean
§ 03 · The cycle calendar

When this drive runs.

CycleNotesStatus
2026First Congress-wide annual cycle · post-Convention ratificationplanning
2025Houston + Chicago Regions ran independent cycles · pre-federationregional
§ 04 · Ways to help

Pick the way that fits.

Send something home.

$25 fills one household for a week Your contribution joins a published cycle with a published manifest.