Maggie Sachs loves peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which you could tell if you looked in the shopping bag the 5-year-old brought yesterday to a holiday concert and food drive at Goucher College.
"Maggie brought the things she thought other children might like to eat," said Louise Rowles, who took Maggie and her other grandchild, Evie, to the charity event sponsored by the nonprofit group Harvest for the Hungry. Among Maggie's contributions: a large jar of peanut butter.
So far this year, Harvest for the Hungry has collected 1.8 million pounds of food, the highest tally in the organization's eight-year history, said Larry Adam, the group's founder. The organization is expected to raise that amount to 2 million pounds of food by the end of the month.
"We've got 46 tractor-trailers' worth of food," said Mr. Adam, who conducts private and public-sector charity campaigns to feed the hungry in Maryland.
Yesterday's event featured a free concert by the U.S. Army Field Band and Soldiers Chorus. Audience members dropped their shopping bags by the front door and filled an auditorium on the Towson campus, listening to an afternoon of patriotic tunes and holiday songs.
The day before, two concerts on the campus featuring international folk and Irish music drew donations as well.
The event yesterday was one of dozens of food drives Harvest for the Hungry has planned in the weeks before Christmas.
Groups ranging from employees at Bethlehem Steel Corp. to the Social Security Administration have participated in the campaign.
At yesterday's event, people donated seasonal goods such as honey-baked ham, and more practical fare, including giant cans of kidney beans and corn flakes. The dozens of grocery bags were a small amount compared to some of the group's larger food drives, Mr. Adam said.
"This is just one-thousandth of what we do in a given period," said Mr. Adam, who is a senior executive at Dean Witter Reynolds Inc.
"This is not a huge amount of food we collected today, but it's important because of the feeling of community a day like this creates."
The donated goods go to the Maryland Food Bank, which distributes the items to 900 food programs across the state. The food will go toward emergency relief and Christmas boxes, said Bill Ewing, the food bank's executive director.
"The average person doesn't get to connect with disadvantaged people," he said. "That's why this drive is so important."