Big Give began in 2010 as an act of generosity from Open Life to the families of Liberty Ridge Elementary School with 150 Thanksgiving meals.  The Bonney Lake Food Bank saw the potential of bringing all of the Thanksgiving food provision events together as one, so in 2011 the Big Give took on a community-wide focus. In 2012, the Food Bank was no longer able to provide meals during the Thanksgiving Season and invited Open Life to take the lead in coordinating the distribution of Thanksgiving meals to the community. Soon, the Big Give became a region-wide event with new partnerships that included Walmart, dozens of sponsors, as well as the support of the counseling departments in the local School Districts.

When COVID hit, we shifted from two physical locations to a delivery system for getting meals to those who live in the Sumner-Bonney Lake, Dieringer & White River School District Communities.  The local food banks become satellite locations following the deliveries for those who didn’t have deliverable addresses or were unavailable for delivery, in order that everyone gets a meal who is experiencing need.

This event has become the community’s collective tool to supply Thanksgiving meals to those in need each year. The Community Big Give is only possible through the generous gifts of people’s time and finances. Would you consider volunteering at this year’s event and making a donation to the Community Big Give? Each complete meal only costs $35. Let’s help families have a great Thanksgiving.

How will you serve? VOLUNTEER HERE

How many families will you sponsor for meals? DONATE HERE

Thank you in advance for your involvement.

2026 will mark the first year at a new meal assembly location.

Walmart Partnership

As we quickly approach leading another Community Big Give it comes with some significant last-minute changes this year. For the past 15 years, The Community Big Give has had a partnership with the Bonney Lake Walmart. From having General Managers that go to bat to find donations above and beyond what we are seeking to finding vendors who would cut price deals in order to facilitate such a large act of generosity within the region. It has made our life a bit easier as the logistics of product acquisition have largely been covered by managers within Walmart unless there were unforeseen challenges with certain items as the event approached.

This partnership has not always been easy, as the event has grown; finding 1750 items to facilitate a distribution has been a challenge, and over the past few years more and more items have needed to be tracked down through other community food sources like Winco and Grocery Outlet.

But Walmart has done much more than just allowing us the opportunity to bulk order food. They have sponsored this event with anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000; they have provided dozens of pallets to place food up off the ground, allowed the use of a forklift and an employee to run all the product out to the distribution locations, stored all of the items they have ordered until the event date, and much more.

Historically, it has been a significant source of regional pride for Walmart. We have valued the partnership for sure.

But after a number of months attempting to confirm the status of our ordering power through Walmart, we were informed that Walmart would not be participating in this year’s Community Big Give and that we would need to pursue other purchasing options. While we are not confident of the reasoning behind their shift in community engagement, we do recognize that last year’s event presented challenges for everyone involved and placed significant stress and time investment on their part and ours.

We have heard author Craig Groeschel say, “Limitation breeds innovation”. Speaking to the moments we face where it seems our plans have fallen apart, but in those moments something beautiful comes of it. And we believe this will be our experience this year.

Not only have we quickly found all of the items for this year’s meals, we found them at a record low price thanks to Winco, Grocery Outlet, Cascadia Produce and oddly enough Auburn Walmart. But food was just one piece of the puzzle, we now had to find a way to acquire the food, store the food and distribute the food without the resources that Walmart had allowed us over the past 15 years. We put out the word to the powers that be within the community and the owner of the Peak410 Development offered their site. And within this site are a number of our partners already in East Pierce Fire and Rescue, Peak and Paddle, and GoodRoots.

And that is where the next piece of the puzzle comes in. GoodRoots has offered to host the event which will afford us storage and acquisition of products from around the region into their warehouse to ensure the distribution location is a great experience. And the assembly of the bags will for the first time in many years be weather-resistant.

While there are a number of logistics still to be coordinated and we are figuring out how to get dozens and dozens of pallets of food moving all in a few days to this new location, we are blessed to have such an open welcome to utilize a property of this magnitude.

We are innovating and saving the community money and resources as we do. And putting money into some new organizations that will be very blessed to partner with The Community Big Give this year and hopefully many years to come.