The Central Alabama Fair has come and gone, but its benefits will be felt for some time.

For the second year, the annual Kid’s Day supported the local food pantry Christian Outreach Alliance. Students were admitted to the fair that night with a canned good donation.

More than 1,000 cans were collected.

“The Lions Club doing this for us is just tremendous because this food we don’t have to buy,” said Buddy Perkins, volunteer at Christian Outreach Alliance. “So it’s just a huge benefit to us that the fair does this.”

Perkins said the pantry gives out around 250 bags of food a week with each bag having 8.5 pounds inside. Volunteers get together every Wednesday to prepare the bags and hand them out to qualified community members on Thursday.

“That’s really exciting for the Lions Club to be able to give that much to an organization that gives out food for needy people,” said fair manager John Haskell. “It was a good success. The Lions Club itself is proud to be able to donate with the cans back to the community. We give just about all of the money back to the community through different organizations.”

Haskell said that although he doesn’t know for sure how many cans were donated last year, he and Perkins believe that the number grew this year.

“We’re going to try it again next year, and we just hope that the success keeps coming every year,” Haskell said. “We couldn’t do this without the community coming in and giving.”

Haskell said they are not sure yet how much money the fair raised this year, but they were happy overall with the attendance.

“The numbers were down about 450 people less this year than there was last year. We had a lot of stuff going on around Selma … so that probably had something to do with it,” Haskell said. “Overall, we’re satisfied with what we got.”

Perkins asked that if a church or school is having a food drive to consider donating to the Alliance.

“We want it to keep on growing because it’s all going to a good cause, feeding the poor, feeding the hungry,” Perkins said.