Rob Adams, age 50, said when he was young, he and his family experienced homelessness and lived in the back of a pickup truck. Adams’s parents had only enough money for him and his siblings to stay in a motel room one night a week, he said, so for the better part of 1982-83, they spent the other six nights in the covered bed of their pickup truck in Porter, Texas, just outside Houston.
But just before Christmas that year, a local family from their church offered up their house for two weeks while they headed out of town for the holidays. Inside, they left several surprises for the family. There were presents under the tree and the fridge was filled with food, including a turkey and homemade pies. “Unless you’ve been hungry, you can’t imagine how I felt,” he said. “I told myself, ‘Someday if I have the money, I’m going to do this for somebody else.’ ”
Adams made good on that promise and started “Thanksgiving’s Heroes,” a nonprofit that each of the past few years has delivered +2,500 boxes on this holiday — each filled with a Thanksgiving feast weighing +53 pounds — to homes in the Salt Lake Valley.
Rob Adams has done well in real estate and now loves giving back. “My big meal of the day when I was young was the school lunch, and many nights, there was no dinner,” Rob told reporters. “Unless you’ve been hungry, you can’t imagine how I felt when I saw that full fridge that Thanksgiving back in 1982, I literally started crying,” he said.
Since starting the charity in 2015, Rob and his friends continue to give away more meals each Thanksgiving. They have begun to expand into Texas and Florida as well as Utah and have plans for Arizona and Pennsylvania and would like to grow it into a national operation soon. Anyone can donate to the cause via the website thanksgivingsheroes.org and anyone can nominate a person or family that is in need of a package.
Rod added…“The message I would love to share is that it’s not about the food it’s about delivering hope in a hopeless time.” Great stuff!
