Chicken tenders donation to charity

The Olive Tree received a boost to their outreach support following two large donations from Mary Brown’s Chicken.

Mary Brown’s ran two fundraising campaigns to gather donations.

“We like to do some sort of food drive every year,” said Ashleigh Jarvis, Mary Brown’s owner. “This year we decided to support Lloydminster because we have two stores here.”

“We were looking at options of where to go and The Olive Tree is always a really good supporter of our community so we wanted to help how we could.”

The first of the two campaigns saw the restaurant giving away free chicken for food donations.

“Every time you made a food donation you got a free Big Mary,” said Jana Thompson, chief operations officer, The Olive Tree. “They ended up giving away 710 Big Mary’s and they donated over 550 pounds of food to us.”

The second fundraising campaign was born of an idea on how to advertise a new product on the Mary Brown’s menu.

“We’ll have a wing eating contest that would be fun,” said Jarvis. “We had four people from the community come out and do it, and we told them $15 for every one you eat.”

The participants only had five minutes to eat as many wings as they could, turning the fun contest into a $1,005 donation to The Olive Tree, ultimately eating 67 wings.

Thompson says the money and food continues to support The Olive Tree and the service they provide to the community.

“It seems like we’re very low on food donations all the time right now, that’s just a sign of the economy, the cost of food right now is higher, a lot more people are requesting support in that way,”

The funds and food both go towards the meal programs and the hamper programs.

“Even having the money so we can go purchase things we need, that’s an amazing contribution,” said Thompson.