Humanitarian Wood Work Day – Woodstock

For the last 16 years volunteers in McCall have provided firewood free of charge for local families in need, providing them with essential warmth during the winter as part of their Humanitarian Wood Work Day, or Woodstock.

Verbatim:

Humanitarian Wood Work Day, or Woodstock, is a local event in McCall, Idaho, organized by the Heartland Hunger Resource Center, which is the community food bank.

Every year for the last 16 years the call goes out, and volunteers show up in their boots and gloves, with wood splitters, trailers and pickups to process and deliver firewood for local families in need, providing them with essential warmth during the winter.

“Woodstock itself started kind of with the same group of people that recognized hunger, and they recognized the people that really count on firewood, and this is a community that was probably built on people warming their homes with firewood,” Linda Klind heads up the Heartland Hunger Resource Center.

Multiple area churches, organizations, and individuals participate, and Klind says many who donate don’t want any recognition for it.

Over 200 volunteers showed up, spending the day splitting over 130 cords of firewood for 80 local familes local families from Donnelly to New Meadows.

But the effort takes many days of work, some of it weeks ahead as logs are hauled in and cut into rounds. On the day of splitting and hauling the Valley/Adams County Farm Bureau cooked food for all the volunteers.

Many years so much is donated that they have leftover wood, which is stored for the winter for families that may not of heard of the event in September.

“We store that wood, and then for emergency needs throughout the winter we, you know, help families and sometimes those are those are events that are really heart wrenching, cause somebody's calling us in the winter, they sometimes really don’t have a way to heat their home,” said Klind.

Woodstock is strictly a community effort; no government funds support it. 

The Food Bank itself started in the year 2000 and is open every Wednesday for the community.