It was one of those perfect New England autumn days when Individual Giving Manager Merry Renduchintala, Director of
Communications Mark Cherrington, and Agency Services Coordinator Vinh Vuong
visited the Hope for Life food pantry in Granby the other week. The pantry is the
first of several partner programs to benefit from a grant given to Foodshare by
BJ’s Charitable Foundation. The grant is intended to provide money for pantries
and other partner programs to purchase needed equipment. In the case of Hope
for Life, the equipment is a new cooler, which will have a substantial impact
on the pantry’s services.
The pantry is housed in the basement of the Life Church and
is run by the church’s pastor, Al Royal. Pastor Al has an interesting
background: with degrees in engineering and management, he worked for 20 years
in the corporate world, first as a management specialist for a major company,
then through his own consulting business. During that time, he lived in eight
countries and worked in thirty countries over the years. Then, in 2002, he was
called to the clergy and founded Life Church, a nondenominational congregation,
with his wife, Christine.
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| Pastor Al |
Pastor Al is an enthusiastic man—enthusiastic about
everything, but particularly about helping people in his community get the food
they need. “I grew up very poor in inner city St. Louis,” he said. “We used to
wait for the government truck to show up with milk and cheese, just to get by. When
we first talked with the church board about the idea of having a pantry, people
told me, ‘Granby has no need.’ That just isn’t true. When we started, there
were eight families coming here. Now there are 30.”
As the need has grown, so has the pantry. Until recently,
Pastor Al says, he was buying all his food at retail stores, and his budget was
getting stretched very thin. Then he learned about Foodshare, and everything
changed: “I was going to the store and spending $20 to get 10 boxes of cereal.
I was pretty proud of myself, thinking that $2 a box was a really good deal. At
Foodshare I got 120 boxes of cereal for a $23 handling fee. Because of
Foodshare, we are serving almost three times as many people and giving away
twice as much food, while spending less than we used to spend at stores. We could never afford fresh produce before.
Now we can.”
Because of the much larger quantity of food Foodshare
provides, the pantry has spread across four rooms: three storage rooms and one
large space for serving clients. When people come in, they are given a form
showing all the foods available that day, and they check off which ones they
want. Then a runner takes the order back to the storage rooms and collects that
food. But the existing refrigerators and freezers are crammed with food and
spread across the three storage rooms, and it’s hard for the runners to know
which refrigerator or freezer a given food item might be in. Thanks to the BJ’s
grant, the new cooler, which can also be converted to a freezer, will solve
that problem, consolidating all the food in one place, speeding up service to
the clients, and making space for far more perishable food for clients.
Part of improving the service to clients is moving to later
hours of operation, starting at 4:30. “With our new hours, we can serve working
people,” Pastor Al says. “On Wednesday nights, it’s packed; people rush over
here from work. And we leverage our facility to minister to all of the needs of
the people. It’s a very comfortable
environment in here: we have music, and people will sit here and talk. We have grief counselors; we have a staff to
help people find jobs.”
You might think that with all this good work, Pastor Al might
rest on his laurels. But in fact he spends his one day off volunteering with
Foodshare. “I volunteer on the Foodshare meat truck,” he says. “We’ll pick up
160 coolers of meat each day! People ask
me why I do this, and I tell them it’s my way of giving back. We are so blessed
in this country, but yet people go to bed hungry. And we are throwing away
filet mignon and T-bone steaks. It’s criminal. I share this all with everyone,
and I think people are finally getting a real appreciation of what Foodshare does.
When I first experienced it, I cried, because now we can get food on the table
of hungry people.”
Are you looking for a way to give back this season? Join the Movement to find out how you can help!
Health care providers and payers (e.g., insurers) are increasingly seeking to work with food banks to ensure that food insecure patients receive nutrition assistance. These collaborations often require communication about the needs of patients and clients. But with more communication comes increased responsibility to think critically about how information that relates to patients and clients is shared and protected.
