Oklahoma Food Bank Turns Volunteer Appreciation Into a Weeklong Event
Oklahoma’s food bank tied Volunteer Appreciation Week to retention, after volunteers logged 117,143 hours and saved more than $3.59 million in labor costs.
The Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma turned volunteer appreciation into an operating strategy this spring, staging a weeklong event from April 21 to 25 that mixed themed shifts, games and thank-you gifts with a very practical goal: keep volunteers coming back. The organization said the program was built around western day, food day and a sports-dedicated shift, a format meant to make recurring work feel fresh while recognizing the people who keep food moving across central and western Oklahoma.
The timing mattered. Set during National Volunteer Month, the event gave the food bank a public-facing moment to recruit, thank and retain helpers at once. OU Health served as presenting sponsor, and Alliance Steel Building Systems, Tinker Federal Credit Union and Lopez-Dorada backed the effort with donations. For a network like A Simple Gesture, where route coverage and pickup reliability depend on volunteers showing up week after week, that kind of cadence offers a clear lesson: appreciation works best when it is built into the calendar, not left to a year-end thank-you.
The scale of the volunteer force makes the case even stronger. In the food bank’s last fiscal year, more than 47,000 individuals volunteered 117,143 hours, saving the organization more than $3.59 million in labor costs. Its 2024 impact reporting put volunteer hours at nearly 130,000 and labor savings at more than $3.795 million. The year before that, volunteers logged 45,701 hours and saved more than $2.52 million, while fiscal year 2022 brought nearly 28,000 volunteers, 71,565 hours and more than $1.7 million in labor savings. Those numbers show that volunteer appreciation is not a soft perk. It is a labor-management tool tied directly to staffing capacity.
Stacy Dykstra, who has led the Regional Food Bank since October 2020 after previously heading Smart Start Central Oklahoma, has overseen a system that serves 53 counties in central and western Oklahoma and works through more than 1,300 partner agencies and schools. Volunteers sort and pack food, assemble Food for Kids meals and snacks, package Senior Servings meals, support mobile food distributions, stock shelves and help guests at the Food & Resource Center. With volunteer sites at 3355 South Purdue in Oklahoma City and 2635 N. Shields Blvd. in Moore, the food bank’s model shows how a little structure around recognition can protect a much larger operation.
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