SoSA’s executive director, Mike Waldmann, will retire at the end of this year, after 22 years with the organization. He first joined as director of the North Carolina office following a career in the Coast Guard. Waldmann then became operations manager in the Virginia office, and for the past 8 years, he was director of the entire organization. SoSA celebrated his time with us in a most appropriate way – bagging up 40,000 pounds of potatoes in the parking lot of his home church in Forest, Virginia.

Mike Waldmann, SoSA’s executive director, spends lots of time behind his desk, and plenty of time talking with people to promote our food distribution, and here he is in a real driver’s seat, moving the potatoes himself!

More than 100 volunteers arrived on Saturday morning, October 15, to bag up the giant mound of sweet potatoes. They were from Mountain View United Methodist Church, the Forest Rotary Club, the Society of St. Andrew national and regional staff, and the SoSA Board of Directors. It was a wonderful experience to have all these groups together, bagging, hauling, and loading trucks with bags of potatoes.

After volunteers piled bags for various organizations in the parking lot, trucks and vans arrived in the lot to take the potatoes back for distribution. Eight organizations loaded up to feed the hungry in their communities. Then all the remaining bags were loaded into the truck from the Lynchburg Food Bank for distribution to even more feeding agencies.

Society of St. Andrew thanks Mike Waldmann for all his years of service. There was no better way to do that than to gather the board, the staff, the church, and the community to feed people together!