Happy Thanksgiving All (and a belated Thanksgiving to our Canadian friends)! Few things say Thanksgiving more than family, food, and friendship. Several sports-related subreddits have banded together in a friendly contest to make the holidays a little brighter.

The goal of this non-monetary contest is to donate items to food banks to reduce hunger over the holidays. Whether you can donate a can of green beans or a full Thanksgiving feast, there's something to be said for all of us coming together for a common goal to take on hunger. The contest will run November 23-30.

Editor's note: Juuust a little late on our part

In order to participate, all we ask you to do is the following:

1. Pick an item or items of food to donate to a food bank. See resources below to help pick what and where to donate.
2. Take a picture of the items you are donating at the place you are donating.
3. Post the picture to imgur.
4. Post a link to the picture in this thread.
   

We're counting on the honor system, because it's a holiday food drive. Give whatever you feel comfortable with.

We'd like to welcome the following subreddits who are joining us in competition:

• /r/CFB
• /r/hockey
• /r/baseball
• /r/nba
• /r/collegebasketball
• /r/collegesoccer

Additionally, /r/sports, /r/NFL, and /r/FCS have agreed to sticky links to our competition, but not participate directly.

To (pumpkin?) spice up the contest, the following prizes are available:

(Leave some suggestions in the comments!)

Finding places to donate in your area

• Feeding America
• No Kid Hungry
• FoodPantries
• Ample Harvest

Some suggestions for basic do's and don'ts of donating

Do:

• Donate non-perishable canned, boxed, or bagged items.
• Donate proteins.
• Donate toiletries and personal hygiene products.
• Donate cleaning supplies.
• Donate baby supplies or kid-friendly items.
• Donate staples, condiments, and spices.
• Donate tools like can or bottle openers (if your donation center takes them).
• Donate pet supplies (if your donation center takes them).

Don't:

• Don't donate expired or about to expire food.
• Don't donate opened items.
• Don't donate potentially odd or hard to use items (no canned monkey brains, please).
• Don't donate home-canned or prepared items.
• Don't donate items that require lots of additions to work (mixes that need milk and butter, for example).
• Don't donate just canned cream corn.

If you're not sure, ask your local donation center, food pantry, or shelter. Ask yourself if it can be prepared or used with limited resources, equipment and time.

We will also accept pictures of monetary donation confirmations, but we'd like to stress the following:

• The focus of the contest should not be on money, but coming together as a community, and all donations of items or money will be praised equally, and the focus will be on items.
• We'd like to have an album of pictures to showcase what we can accomplish as a community.

Thank you for participating and being part of such a wonderful community. Although we love competition, our goal is our shared spirit of competition to make the holidays a little brighter for a lot of people.

Post on /r/sports

Direct Donation Link

Major Update: The intent of this contest had been to have a non-monetary way for users to contribute to a project that does good so that we can reach a wider set of users. The end result has made the process of participating in the contest a little more involved, which has brought the total number of participants down. While the focus of the contest is still non-monetary (and we very much love pictures), /u/Honestly_ has set up a tilt for anyone to donate to in as frictionless a way as possible. We want to stress the following:

• When you donate, you can specify what sub and/or team you want your donation to count for.
• All user donations will be counted and valued equally. We love our generous users, however the specific goal of this contest is to get as many users in for whatever amount they feel comfortable with.
  
• For this particular contest we would rather have 300 $2 donations than 15 $50 donations, since one of the goals is not just to provide meals, but to build a community in /r/CFB and through the sports subreddits.
  
• A $1 donation to the tilt will go directly to Feeding America (minus a 3% credit card fee), and will feed 10 people. /u/bakonydraco started off the tilt with a $1 donation (partly because he already submitted a food donation), mainly to stress that $1-5 donations are both welcome and encouraged
• You can see a list of past tilt's /u/Honestly_ has hosted here. Here is a page with all of /r/CFB's past donations.