TEMECULA, Calif. – (November 14, 2018) – On a recent sunny autumn day in Temecula at Pechanga Resort Casino, turkeys and toilet paper took center stage at the casino’s loading dock. Volunteers from the resort/casino packed up 500 turkeys and more than 1,000 partially unused rolls of toilet paper.
The week before Thanksgiving, representatives from the Murrieta Pantry, the Menifee Valley Community Cupboard and the Pechanga School backed up their trucks for the birds and toilet tissue to be loaded up. In only about 30 minutes, all 500 Thanksgiving turkeys and the TP had been hoisted and placed onto the trucks to be delivered to some of the region’s most deserving families, seniors, veterans and individuals.
“For most of the people we serve, this is the only way they’re going to be able to get a turkey for Thanksgiving, and it makes all the difference in the world,” said Dawn Smith, program director of the Menifee Valley Community Cupboard. “This time of the year and all the rest of the year they’ve been struggling and making ends meet and we’re helping them all year long, but if they can’t have a traditional Thanksgiving meal, it makes it that much more difficult to struggle by.”
Annually, Pechanga donates 500 turkeys to area food pantries and organizations in need for Thanksgiving, and another 500 during the December holidays. This is the first year the pantries received toilet paper from Pechanga’s 1,090 hotel rooms and suites. The resort collects and saves rolls with not enough toilet tissue on them to be placed in hotel rooms. These collections are regularly donated to regional non-profit assistance organizations. Each year, Pechanga donates more than 20,000 partial rolls of toilet paper, helping to further stretch the budgets of the area’s underserved.
The Menifee Valley Community Cupboard serves 300 families and individuals for Thanksgiving, and hundreds more throughout the year. The Murrieta Pantry serves more than 500 families each week, and the Pechanga School annually brings turkeys for Thanksgiving dinners to a less fortunate tribe. This year, the turkeys they picked up from Pechanga Resort Casino go to the Santa Rosa Tribe near Anza, Calif.