By Jennifer Cleveland, Support Services
For the past several years, the WestCare Iowa/Family Alliance for Veterans of America (FAVA) has been generously awarded funds to be able to provide everyday necessities to Veteran households. With these funds, we can purchase items such as food, hygiene products, Christmas gifts, fuel cards, etc. With the funds granted this year, FAVA partnered with the local Fareway Meat & Grocery store in Clear Lake, IA to supply our Veterans with a variety of meat products. I recently reached out to Fareway to see if they would be willing to help us with a large order of meat since they are known for their quality meat and fair prices. I worked with the Meat Department Manager, Ryan Sasbender, to put together an order and walked along the meat counter and picked a variety of different meats to fill our freezers. I was impressed with the services that Ryan provided, as they were not only going to order a large amount of product but also went the extra mile to prepare individual portions for us to easily distribute to our Veteran households. They ground fresh beef and pork for us; packaged pork ribs, chicken hindquarters, and beef ribeye; and shaved ham and turkey into individual portions too! We recognized that they put in a tremendous amount of extra work packaging everything we ordered for our Veterans at no extra charge.
Within two weeks, our order was ready to be picked up and when we arrived to load up the product, Ryan and his employees jumped right in and started loading up the vehicles for us. We had a budget of $3,000 to spend on meat and when I went to pay for the order, I found out that they had rounded down the order to exactly $3,000 to fit our budget!
We cannot express our appreciation enough for the exceptional generosity and kindness that the employees of Fareway gave our team. It was a true pleasure working with them! The FAVA team was extremely impressed with the service that we received and are excited to be able to provide our Veterans with quality meat in manageable sizes! Thank you, Fareway! We look forward to working with you again in the future!
