A donation bin sits outside the front doors of Weston City Hall at 17200 Royal Palm Boulevard. It is under cover and open 24 hours a day, all year. On October 23 the city posted a new notice for holiday meal donations. It says more Broward families are facing food insecurity and that Harvest Drive is getting more requests for help.
The bin is the easy part to see. The system it feeds was built in Weston. It started as a simple idea about how a few hundred families could fill a few thousand cabinets, and the idea still holds.
A Country Isles Classroom Project, Thirty-Four Years Later
Harvest Drive was founded in August 1992 at Country Isles Elementary in Weston. The City of Weston's own history of the program says it started "to empower students to help their fellow students," and that the early volunteers brought food and other necessities to Broward school families in need at Thanksgiving.
The organization still uses the same motto:
"Children Helping Children"
The program has grown well beyond one school, but its structure has barely changed. In November 2025, more than 190 schools collected food and 12 school sites ran distribution. Together they provided more than 2,200 families with at least a week's worth of groceries plus the makings of a Thanksgiving meal. Volunteers collected, sorted, bagged and handed out more than 13,000 bags of groceries that month. That works out to roughly six bags per family, which matches the 4 to 8 bags the program describes giving each household.
The founder, Renee Herman, described the year-round reach to Local 10 in November 2025: "We are assisting over 25,000 people in Broward County annually. Our November drive assists about 12,000 people." In the same report, Local 10 described what began in 1992 as a small holiday campaign that grew into a year-round charity.
Why the Model Depends on Small Donations
Harvest Drive's program page explains the mechanism directly. Buying 200 jars of peanut butter or 800 cans of soup at once is hard and expensive for anyone. A company that asks each employee for four items, or a school that asks each student for one, makes the job manageable.
So the drive runs as a pipeline, and every stage of it sits inside the school system:
- Schools sign on. The Thanksgiving Drive ramps up at the start of each school year. Every Broward County school can choose to collect and to receive referrals for its families.
- Families are referred. Broward County school social workers and local agencies such as Healthy Mothers Healthy Babies and FLITE identify the families who will receive bags.
- Distribution sites pack. About a dozen school-based sites coordinate volunteers to sort and pack what the collecting schools bring in.
- Families receive the meal. Each household gets 4 to 8 bags of groceries plus a gift card or perishables to complete the Thanksgiving meal.
The organization also credits a volunteer-run Harvest Drive Café, which feeds hundreds of volunteers during the season with donations from local restaurants, organizations and retailers.
Because the program is built this way, a donation request from a child's school feeds directly into the main supply line. The program page asks parents to help children fill a Harvest Drive request when it comes home and to let them take part.
Where Weston Fits Into the 2026 Drive
The 2026 distribution-site list names Cypress Bay High School at 18600 Vista Park Blvd. as the Weston site. The other sites on the list include Blanche Ely in Pompano Beach, McArthur and South Broward in Hollywood, Coconut Creek High, Plantation High, Fort Lauderdale High and Stranahan. Country Isles, where the drive started, lists parent volunteers supporting Harvest Drive in its 2025–2026 school plan.
Harvest Drive asks community partners to work with their local distribution school, so they help families near where they live and work. In Weston, Weston Together reported in September that food left in the City Hall bin goes to Harvest Drive, with the city handling the delivery. Households without a school connection still have a direct route into the same system.
What Moves Fastest
That same Weston Together report passed along Harvest Drive's list of the nonperishables that go out fastest, both to families in homes and to people who are unhoused.
| Item | Note from Harvest Drive's list |
|---|---|
| Cereal | Among the fastest-moving items |
| Mac and cheese | Among the fastest-moving items |
| Granola bars | Among the fastest-moving items |
| Chef Boyardee | Pull-tab tops preferred |
| Canned soup | Pull-tab tops preferred |
| Supermarket BOGO extras | Drop the free item in the bin |
| Sheets, blankets, towels | Needed year-round and easy to forget |
The BOGO suggestion matches the program's own logic of many small contributions. A free second box of cereal from a regular grocery run costs the donor nothing extra, and repeated across a city it adds up. The city's October notice repeats the same request for supermarket BOGOs.
The Linens Go to a Different Program
The linen request points to a part of Harvest Drive that has no Thanksgiving deadline. The Harvest Drive Boutique gives gently used clothing and household items to referred families and children at no cost. Families reach it through the same channels as the food program. A school social worker fills out a referral form, or a community agency caseworker requests one. Harvest Drive describes the Boutique as a source of clothing, shoes, books, toys, bed linens, towels and kitchen essentials, "the household items necessary to make a house a home."
The Boutique is on the east side of the A+ Storage Building at 4021 S.W. 47th Ave., Bays #2 and #3, in Davie's New Town Commerce Center, north of Orange Drive and south of I-595. Adult volunteers sort donations and fill referrals there on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Visits are by appointment through the Boutique and volunteer coordinator, Davi Leoniff, so contact the Boutique before you drive over. Local 10 reported that dozens of referrals arrive at the Davie location every day.
Giving as a Group This Month
Thanksgiving falls on November 26 this year, so there are three weeks left in the season the drive is built around. Harvest Drive invites businesses, places of worship, civic organizations and families who want to help during the holidays to contact Renee Herman or Holly Stracquadaine. Their contact details are on the organization's programs page. A group donation works best when it goes through a distribution school, which takes us back to the employee-asks-for-four approach.
A homeowners association committee, an office or a youth team can use the fast-moving list above as its shopping list. Bringing a carload to the City Hall bin is simple, since the bin never closes.
If you plan an evening drop-off tonight, Thursday, November 5, plan your route. The City of Weston says the southbound I-75 exit to westbound Royal Palm Boulevard closes from 8 p.m. until 5 a.m. Friday, with a detour by Griffin Road and Weston Road. If the work is delayed, Monday, November 9 through Thursday, November 12 are the contingency dates. The bin will still be there in the morning.
If you are clearing out a linen closet before holiday guests arrive or before putting a home on the market, those sheets, blankets and towels belong in the bin. When you are ready to talk about what comes after the closet, The Scarberry Group is glad to help. Request a complimentary home valuation and staging consultation, and Phyllis will walk your home with you, room by room.
