As Fred Tazartes left Sam’s Club on Carl Boyer Drive, he reached into a cart and handed some food to representatives of the Santa Clarita Valley Corvette Club to donate to those in need.
Tazartes said he works for a local nonprofit that helps educate youth facing food insecurity, and said he knows firsthand that a little goes a long way.
“I can tell you, the faces of people I’ve seen, it’s amazing. It’s going to make a difference,” Tazartes said. “To me, a jar of peanut butter is nothing. To them, it makes a big difference.”
Tazartes was one of several people who gave food to the Corvette Club as they left the grocery store at Saturday’s food drive — some even donated entire carts.
“It’s amazing how generous people can be, and you don’t realize it until you get here and do these pantry things. People respond,” said Jim Webbers, vice president of the Corvette Club Special said. “It’s been great that people donate toothpaste, toothbrushes, peanut butter—you know all these non-perishable things. We have a little list that we send out to people that they really need so that when they’re in the store , they will know what we want to put in the shopping basket.”
The campaign is coordinated with Los Angeles area food banks and SCV food pantries, which will help distribute food locally. James Espinoza, executive director of SCV Food Pantry, said the events were usually very successful – filling two to three truckloads of food.
“We typically get about two or three truckloads of these vans … On average, the pantry serves about 50 families a day, five days a week,” Espinosa said. “The families are all different, seniors, small families, extended families, and some of our homeless neighbors … We struggle with food insecurity year-round, people go hungry year-round. You can’t feed They’re done in one go, so we have continuous food drives like this and partnerships with the Corvette Club and various other clubs and churches and organizations.”
To help entice shoppers to check out the foodie event, the club, of course, has wheels. There are a few Corvettes scattered throughout the parking lot, but two are displayed next to the dining car: a 2019 C7 Stingray in Ceramic Matrix Gray Metallic (one of only 1,500 produced) and a blue C7 Convertible.
