Your friendly local postal carrier will be transformed into a canned- food collector, if only for a day, this month.

The annual Stamp Out Hunger campaign will be May 9.

Letter carriers in the city of Ironton and village of Coal Grove will collect donations of non-perishable food as they deliver mail that day.

Fliers will be put in the mail ahead of time, asking residents to donate.

The letter carriers will be joined by volunteers from the Ironton City Mission, to which all the food is being donated.

City Mission Director, the Rev. Jeff Cremeans, said the food is sorely needed.

“The first quarter of this year we fed 401 families,” Cremeans said. “A lot of them were first-time people. That tells you a lot about the economy.”

The campaign is organized each year by the National Association of Letter Carriers but local food drive coordinator Kevin Nichols said at the Ironton Post Office, the event is embraced by the entire staff.

“We don’t have a single person in this office that doesn’t participate,” Nichols said. “From the postmaster on down, everybody participates.”

Cremeans said that the food is used to feed a lot of hungry people.

“It is going to help the needy in Lawrence County,” Cremeans pointed out. “It is not being sent out of the county, out of the country. It stays here locally.”

Nichols said the Stamp Out Hunger campaign is something about which he is most passionate.

“It means some child won’t go to bed hungry and if one child goes to bed having had something to eat, then we’ve accomplished something,” Nichols said. “I never went to bed hungry as a child, never. It is something I can’t imagine.”

Last year 6,610 pounds of food was collected.