While it is impossible to tell who will come out on top in the Mississippi State and Ole Miss football game Thursday, one “Egg Bowl” has already been decided.
On Tuesday, Baptist Memorial Hospital-Golden Triangle celebrated its victory in its first Baptist “Egg Bowl” food drive competition against Baptist Memorial Hospital-North Mississippi (in Oxford) by donating 20,144 non-perishable food items to Helping Hands.
Jennifer Garrard, executive director of Helping Hands, said this donation was the largest single donation the organization has ever received. She said she had “goosebumps” when she saw the pallets of food and canned goods piled up around the hospital’s conference room on Tuesday.
“In my head, I was just thinking of all the months it will last us,” Garrard said. “We won’t run out quickly. Just the months that we can get through doing food for the community is amazing. I can’t even imagine how long we can go.”
Megan Pratt, marketing director for BMH-GT, said the idea for the competition came about in September, when the Oxford hospital reached out and challenged the Golden Triangle hospital to the food drive competition, which lasted from Nov. 1 to Nov. 17. Pratt said the “Egg Bowl” food drive grew far beyond anything that she expected.
“I knew our employees would come through, but I had no idea it would be this,” Pratt said. “But they got really, really competitive.”
Part of the reason the food drive grew so large, Pratt said, was because the Golden Triangle location also started an internal competition, where employees divided up into teams to attempt to raise the most food items. The Red Team, led by Human Resources Director Jenni Gordman, won the internal competition.
Another reason the competition grew, Pratt said, was because it gave hospital employees a chance to help those outside of the hospital’s walls.
“The way we look at it is that we take really good care of our patients here within the hospital, but we’re always looking for opportunities to minister — because we’re a faith-based organization — so we look for opportunities to minister to our community outside of the walls of the hospital,” Pratt said. “And some of the people that are going to benefit from this, we may not ever get an opportunity to take care of them inside the walls of the hospital, but this is how we can help minister to them through Helping Hands.”
Ashleigh Guyton, coordinator of community relations for BHM-GT, said she helped to facilitate the drive as it went, but it quickly grew beyond what she could do alone.
“The first day, we collected over 1,000 cans,” Guyton said. “That was a bigger canned food drive than we had had at any other canned food drive we’ve done at Baptist. The last day of the competition, that one day alone, we collected over 11,000 cans.”
Guyton said she and other Baptist employees sorted the food and checked expiration dates before they were put into the drive.
Donations included rice, peas, beans, canned meats and much, much more.
“As fun as the competition was, these people would ask me constantly, ‘how many do we have? How many do we have?’” Guyton said. “They truly wanted to know what was going back to their community and they knew they were blessing Helping Hands during the holidays.”
Though BMH-North Mississippi in Oxford technically lost the “Egg Bowl” food drive competition, Pratt said there weren’t really any losers, since the other hospital gathered 13,183 non-perishable food items to benefit a food pantry there.
Guyton said the hospitals plan to make the “Egg Bowl” food drive an annual event. Baptist employees are already gearing up for next year, when they will be shooting for 25,000 items, she said.
“Go Baptist Golden Triangle, 2024!” Guyton said.
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Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 37 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
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