We are very thankful for all of the great things you’ve helped us start.  Have a very happy Thanksgiving.

Sikhcess Team

p.s.  If you’re looking for a place to volunteer this Thanksgiving Season, we encourage you to consider calling your local homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and food pantries and explaining to them that you’d like to help prepare, serve, and clean up after a meal provided to an under-served population.  Keep in mind that this is a very busy time of year and some shelters may be overwhelmed with volunteer activity, so stay patient, and if they say that they are full, offer to volunteer your time into December or January.  Odds are that they’ll say “yes!” and “thank you!”

Volunteers will help prepare the nutritious meals by assembling them into food packages. Packages will contain a Veggie Sandwiches, Peanut-Butter Jelly Sandwiches, Granola Bars, Bananas, Potato Chips and Bottles of Water.

Volunteers will help cut up veggies on Friday night and prepare the packages on Saturday morning. The packages will then be delivered.

How you can help:
• We are looking for volunteers to help out on Friday night at 5:00 PM to help cut the veggies and prepare them for the morning.
• Saturday morning at 8:00 AM we will need volunteers to help prepare the wraps and packages.
• Once the packages are ready, we will need drivers (around 9:30 AM) to help deliver the meals to homeless on the streets and to shelters in the Bay Area.
• If you can not make it to the event, you can always donate at the location or online! For donations on site, please call 909.262.8730. For online donations, please visit www.sikhcess.org/about/donate.

We need YOU to come and volunteer some time!

Project Description: Sikhcess serves thousands of freshly prepared, delicious, and healthy food packages to the needy in cities across the world. Each city is responsible for creating and serving a vegetarian menu that fits their community’s unique needs.

This effort starts with volunteers arriving early in the morning to cook individualized meals. Throughout the day, volunteers help package the tasty and nutritious meals by assembling them into food packages. Packages contain healthy, freshly prepared vegetarian entrees, bottles of water or boxes of fruit juice, granola bars, and other desserts. Once ready, these packages are distributed to the needy on streets and in shelters.

Every month, the homeless and needy take delivery of these food packages. In exchange, Sikhcess™ volunteers receive countless hugs, smiles, and a heart-felt “thank you”, many times over.

Project Description: Sikhcess™ serves thousands of freshly prepared, delicious, and healthy food packages to the needy in cities across the world.  Each city is responsible for creating and serving a vegetarian menu that fits their community’s unique needs.

This effort starts with volunteers arriving early in the morning to cook individualized meals.   Throughout the day, volunteers help package the tasty and nutritious meals by assembling them into food packages.  Packages contain healthy, freshly prepared vegetarian entrees, bottles of water or boxes of fruit juice, granola bars, and other desserts.  Once ready, these packages are distributed to the needy on streets and in shelters.

Every month, the homeless and needy take delivery of these food packages. In exchange, Sikhcess volunteers receive countless hugs, smiles, and a heart-felt “thank you”, many times over.

On Sunday, November 22nd, The Detroit Medical Center (DMC) and Detroit Public Schools (DPS) helped serve a wonderful Thanksgiving meal with special-care packages for guests at the Detroit Rescue Mission Ministries’ (DRMM) Oasis shelter. Residents from Sinai-Grace Hospital and Adult Education Students put on their aprons, gloves, and hairnets and got down to cooking!

Sikhcess was responsible in bringing this event together for 3rd straight year. Sikhcess has been giving “thanks” to the city of Detroit since the inception of the organization. In 2007, Sikhcess collected over 3,000 clothing items and prepared over 10,000 food packages to give to various shelters and to people who live on the street – providing warmth and healthy, nutritious food to those who are less fortunate. The Detroit Rescue Mission, and other similar shelters have their own challenges, and so historically, Sikhcess has worked to lighten that burden. This has been done this by introducing brand new people to volunteer to work with, and at the shelters, where campaign names like “Bundles of Warmth”, “Packages of Love”, and “Feed the Homeless” are recognized in across the city as being identified with a movement of service called “Sikhcess”.

This past event took on a different outlook as volunteers came together to help shop for, cook up, and serve a warm Thanksgiving meal to the Oasis Shelter residents and guests. The Detroit Medical Center helped donate the supplies as Students from Detroit Public Schools lead the service operations. The Oasis’s regular staff was pleased to see such a huge turnout of nearly 40 volunteers!

In the spirit of thanks, 15 children gathered the night before to organize and assemble 400 ‘Packages of Love’, made up of bars of soap, towels, toothbrushes, toothpaste, hand sanitizer, and a lot of love to distribute to the homeless and needy in the City of Detroit. Taking extra time, they hand-packaged each carefully to make sure that those who were served felt their radiating love inside each bag. The kids felt great to be involved to help people, and had a lot of fun too!

At the end of the day, it felt magical to witness such a remarkable showing of giving. Sikhcess has such a strong connection with the city of Detroit. The reason is that in every instance, our volunteers do their best to help educate the citizens at this, and other shelters – and people recognize and appreciate that. As a resident of the Metro-Detroit area and proud child of the ‘D’, I had always thought of giving back, and Sikhcess offers me, and so many others around the world a chance to do just that in an effortless manner.

Watch the kids in action below!

Written by Kartav Patel.

Sikhcess Toronto will be preparing 500 meals for distribution to the homeless and needy on Friday, December 18 and Saturday Deember 19 2009.

Volunteers will help prepare the nutritious meals by assembling them into food packages. Packages will contain a Veggie Wrap, Samosa, Dad’s Oatmeal Cookies, Nature Valley Bar and a bottle of water. The Samosas will already be made and the snacks are already pre-packaged.

Volunteers will help cut up veggies on Friday night and prepare the packages on Saturday morning. The packages will then be delivered.

How you can help:
• We are looking for volunteers to help out on Friday night at 600 PM to help cut the veggies and prepare them for the morning.
• Saturday morning at 600 AM we will need volunteers to help prepare the wraps and packages.
• Once the packages are ready, we will need drivers (around 830 AM) to help deliver the meals to shelters in the Peel Region.
• If you can not make it to our seva, you can always donate items such as shredded cheddar cheese, flat bread tortillas, bottled water, carrots, green peppers, canned beans and granola bars. All donations will be accepted at Shiromani Sikh Sangat, Dunwin.

We need YOU to come and volunteer some time!

Project Description: Sikhcess serves thousands of freshly prepared, delicious, and healthy food packages to the needy in cities across the world.  Each city is responsible for creating and serving a vegetarian menu that fits their community’s unique needs.

This effort starts with volunteers arriving early in the morning to cook individualized meals.   Throughout the day, volunteers help package the tasty and nutritious meals by assembling them into food packages.  Packages contain healthy, freshly prepared vegetarian entrees, bottles of water or boxes of fruit juice, granola bars, and other desserts.  Once ready, these packages are distributed to the needy on streets and in shelters.

Every month, the homeless and needy take delivery of these food packages. In exchange, Sikhcess™ volunteers receive countless hugs, smiles, and a heart-felt “thank you”, many times over.

Project Description: Sikhcess serves thousands of freshly prepared, delicious, and healthy food packages to the needy in cities across the world.  Each city is responsible for creating and serving a vegetarian menu that fits their community’s unique needs.

This effort starts with volunteers arriving early in the morning to cook individualized meals.   Throughout the day, volunteers help package the tasty and nutritious meals by assembling them into food packages.  Packages contain healthy, freshly prepared vegetarian entrees, bottles of water or boxes of fruit juice, granola bars, and other desserts.  Once ready, these packages are distributed to the needy on streets and in shelters.

Every month, the homeless and needy take delivery of these food packages. In exchange, Sikhcess™ volunteers receive countless hugs, smiles, and a heart-felt “thank you”, many times over.

Project Description: Sikhcess serves thousands of freshly prepared, delicious, and healthy food packages to the needy in cities across the world.  Each city is responsible for creating and serving a vegetarian menu that fits their community’s unique needs.

This effort starts with volunteers arriving early in the morning to cook individualized meals.   Throughout the day, volunteers help package the tasty and nutritious meals by assembling them into food packages.  Packages contain healthy, freshly prepared vegetarian entrees, bottles of water or boxes of fruit juice, granola bars, and other desserts.  Once ready, these packages are distributed to the needy on streets and in shelters.

Every month, the homeless and needy take delivery of these food packages. In exchange, Sikhcess™ volunteers receive countless hugs, smiles, and a heart-felt “thank you”, many times over.

Project Description: Sikhcess serves thousands of freshly prepared, delicious, and healthy food packages to the needy in cities across the world.  Each city is responsible for creating and serving a vegetarian menu that fits their community’s unique needs.

This effort starts with volunteers arriving early in the morning to cook individualized meals.   Throughout the day, volunteers help package the tasty and nutritious meals by assembling them into food packages.  Packages contain healthy, freshly prepared vegetarian entrees, bottles of water or boxes of fruit juice, granola bars, and other desserts.  Once ready, these packages are distributed to the needy on streets and in shelters.

Every month, the homeless and needy take delivery of these food packages. In exchange, Sikhcess™ volunteers receive countless hugs, smiles, and a heart-felt “thank you”, many times over.

Project Description: The Sikhcess ‘Packages of Love’ campaign joins volunteers together to help fulfill basic needs for the less fortunate.  Volunteers unite to collect and assemble basic needs hygiene materials – things like towels, toothbrushes, toothpaste, combs, and bar soap – into packages for distribution to the homeless and needy in local communities and across the globe. While each individual package includes basic essentials necessary to maintain hygiene, the key is to putting ‘love’ into the packages.

This sounds true this season as we face a bumpy ride in an uncertain economy and fly through a recession without a tailwind.  So, we here at Sikhcess decided to use our services of Guru Ka Langar, or ‘The Free Community Kitchen’, to serve the needy with food drives around the country this November.

Sikhcess launched successful food drives in cities like Fresno, Chicago, Sacramento, Detroit, Toronto and Cleveland. Over 25,000 food packages were given away freely to those in need of a warm and healthy meal this Thanksgiving holiday season.

Photos of these food drives below show the spirit of ‘thanks’ that went into these food drives as those involved in the food drives worked tirelessly to prepare and hand out the food packages. Sikhcess volunteers gave self-less service to these food drives and worked with the under served populations this Thanksgiving to ensure that no one who came to these food drives went back home without a meal.

Boys, girls, artists, thinkers, techies, DJs, VJs, soccer moms, students, seniors (a.k.a experienced wise men/women), freelancers, professionals, engineers, doctors, etc. came out to help make each of these food drive events a success. And success it was as we at Sikhcess are proud and grateful to say that all of our 25,000 packages were given away on the same day in cities across Canada and America.

We at Sikhcess are really grateful to get this chance to organize these events and go out in the community and reach out to those who for one reason or the other might not have had a warm Thanksgiving. Volunteers who prepared the meals and those who ate those meals, they both were thankful for what this Thanksgiving brings this season. Next year Sikhcess looks forward to ramp up its output to expand the offering to more locations in our current cities and grow into more cities to give out many more food packages.

Happy Thanksgiving!!!