Hundreds of Sammamish residents gathered at White Center Heights Elementary School in Seattle Saturday, Nov. 15 to pass out food, clothes and toys to families in need during the seventh annual ARAS Foundation Harvest Festival.

It was the culmination of a year’s worth of efforts, and approximately 2,000 people in need attended the festival, where not only were they given essential staples such as food and clothes, they also received free haircuts and massages by professionals, toys for children and books, among other things.

“It was phenomenal,” said Mary Trask, ARAS community service director. “The amount of people who volunteered, and the amount of people who we could help was just amazing.”

The Harvest Festival is an annual one-day event where volunteers pass out supplies the foundation has been collecting all year out to underprivileged families. It’s an event put on by the ARAS Foundation, founded in 1978 as an organization to help people in need all over the world. Mary’s husband, Bob Trask, Sammamish resident and founder of the organization, said it provides relief to people in 15 different countries through literacy programs, teaching programs, providing food and clothing for the needy and supporting orphanages, among other things.

“We’re really focused on helping people get better attitudes about life, and a better focus on where their options and opportunities lie,” he said. “We want to help them get their heads above water. You have to get out of survival before you can do anything creative.”

The Harvest Festival began seven years ago when the ARAS Foundation volunteered at a similar event hosted by a chiropractor’s office.

That event was Christmas-themed, and brought in approximately 200 people on the Eastside, Mary said. But they didn’t have the resources to continue, and the ARAS Foundation was asked to take over.

“We said we’d be happy to, but that (they wouldn’t) recognize it when we’re done,” she said.

The event was moved to the fall and given an autumn theme because the foundation felt a non-denominational motif would be more welcoming.

But the biggest change came a couple of years in, when Mary contacted Northwest Services, the largest food bank in Washington, and asked what area had the most need. The festival moved from the Eastside to White Center, and the number of people attending swelled.

“They were substantially more impoverished,” Mary said. “We knew we needed to continue there.”

As the festival grew, so did the lists of volunteers.

Three hundred volunteers assisted on the day of the festival alone, and scores more helped throughout the year to collect goods and organize the event.

By the time of the festival, they amassed 14,000 clothing items, 1,500 new toys and enough food that they were able to donate 60 bags of leftovers to the Issaquah Food Bank. There were also enough leftover clothes to take six bags to Eastside Baby Corner.

“The outpouring was so great that we were able to give stuff back to the community that supports us,” Mary said. “It’s amazing. We always have a lot of volunteers, but this is far more volunteers than we’ve ever had before.”

Volunteers were calling the foundation to ask if they could help, and in a lot of cases, Mary said she didn’t even know how they heard of the Harvest Festival. Groups such as the Mercer Island National Honor Society, Kids Without Borders, the Airman Leadership School class of 2009 and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, among others, all donated supplies and time.

But the majority of volunteers came from Sammamish — about 98 percent, Bob said.

“It’s so amazing to belong to a community where all these people work hard to make money and invest money, and still are so generous and so willing to help other people, even in an entirely separate community,” he said. “These are people they’ve had no contact with or anything. … It’s wonderful to just be a small part of that. Even a small part makes a huge ripple.”

For more information about the ARAS Foundation, call 868-8448, or go to arasfoundation.org.