Bread of Life Mission Trip

Travis and I took the youth from Haynes Flat Baptist Church to Crossville, TN to serve at the Bread of Life Rescue Mission. We had an awesome time!!! Here are some pics!

Pantry (left side) - BEFORE

Pantry (left side) - AFTER

Pantry (right side) - BEFORE

Pantry (right side) - AFTER

Here we are shopping at Save-a-Lot!!!

Here is my car packed with food for the pantry!!!

Inside view of my car!!!

We bought and served dinner too!!!

Here we are organizing the diapers BOL had in stock! 

We also brought 700 diapers from our church's diaper ministry!!!

We also bought dishpans to reorganize their stock of hygiene products!

There were 5 kids there at BOL. 

We bought them backpacks full of school supplies, flip flops, toys, etc.!!!

So what does coupons have to do with this trip?

I actually didn't use coupons on this trip, but here is what i learned in the process:

1. PANTRY - The pantry was empty because their donations have dropped. So make sure you are donating to your local food pantry!!! 

Also, in the first pantry picture you can see a lot of donated ready-to-feed baby formula. These were donated because of coupons! Recently (but not in our area) a $5 coupon came out that could be used on ANY Similac formula. What you could do was buy the ready-to-feed formula for about $3.80 and the OVERAGE from the coupon could be used on the rest of your grocery bill!!! It was an amazing deal and I could tell that a lot of couponers had donated their formula to the pantry! The staff at BOL needed to find families that could use this particular type of formula. I put a post on facebook and quickly found families in need. I now have a bunch of formula getting ready to be shipped to Alabama to families affected by tornados there!!! God is good!!!

2. Save-a-Lot - First of all, Save-a-Lot DOES NOT accept coupons! This is where the BOL pantry buys their stock so this is where we went. I have to say that I really liked it there! Everything was bright and really organized. The prices were really good too!

3. PIZZA - We did not use coupons for the pizza, but Travis did call around to a lot of pizza places until he found the best deal!

4. Diapers - Our youth group has been doing a Diaper Ministry at our church since April. So far our count of diapers given out is around 2,500!!! When we first started we did A LOT of research of diaper deals. For the most part we buy the Walmart brand diapers. No matter what coupon we used at Walmart - these diapers are always the cheapest! We do find some good diaper deals at Krogers and Walgreens on name brand diapers too! I also learned in the process that in order to really save on diapers you need to calculate the price PER diaper in each package. I am amazed at how many time we see that the box size diapers is actually MORE expensive (per diaper) that buying the smaller packs!!! Doing your homework really pays off in the end!!!