A heavy but important ask: Fill the Jeep Food Drive back with another 3,000-pound goal

Martha Hart, director of the Owen Hart Foundation, started the Fill the Jeep Food Drive in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Courtesy Owen Hart Foundation)

The Owen Hart Foundation (OHF) is tagging in Calgarians in its ongoing feud with food insecurity.

OHF is running its annual Fill the Jeep Food Drive, and asking community members to bring non-perishable foodstuffs to drop-off locations around the city.

Martha Hart, Owen’s widow and the foundation’s director, started the food drive in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I had a vision that if all my OHF committee members could leave a bag of food on their doorsteps, and they could encourage their neighbours and friends to do the same, then perhaps I could collect it all and ‘fill my jeep,’” she said Monday in a news release.

Martha says everything collected goes straight to “the Calgary Food Bank and those families most in need.”

This year’s goal is to collect more than 3,000 pounds of food.

Food donations can be left during business hours until April 6 at any of three locations:

• Trapped Escape Room (1139 Kensington Rd. N.W.);
• After Eight Interiors (1135 64 Ave. S.E., unit 109); or
• Tower Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram (10901 Macleod Tr.).

Owen, a pro wrestler, husband and father, died May 23, 1999, at the age of 34, in a stunt gone horribly wrong during a WWE (then WWF) show in Kansas City, Mo.

The foundation was created the following year in his honour.

The Fill the Jeep Food Drive is one of several regular events the foundation puts on.

More information about the foundation and the food drive is available online, at owenhartfoundation.org.