Ed Swartley
Last month, we had a guy come in and say, ‘Hey, this isn’t much of a donation, but you helped me a couple of years ago, and I just wanted to say thank you to all your staff.’ And that’s what we’re about.
We’re always trying to help. Our main goal is to walk along with someone in their time of trouble.
The way we try to help is – when we’re not in lockdown, which we are now – we serve a hot meal. Right now, we’re serving a hot meal out the back door in a package. We also have a Meals on Wheels program where we have drivers deliver hot meals to people. When you total those two together, it’s about a 130, 140 meals per day that we do.
We have a clothing closet, we have a pantry, and just last month we served 610 families when normally we’re right around 425. With COVID, we have almost 200 more families coming in seeking help for a pantry box.
When we are open, we figure we are serving over 300 individuals every day.
We also do free faxing and printing when we’re open. We have a telephone here that people can use. We offer showers and laundry. Right now our showers are down because we’re not allowing people in. We try to help out as much as we can with referrals.
We also have a program here from 3 to 4 p.m. We have food that’s on its last legs that we will put on a table. People will walk in, go through and pick what they want, and walk out the door.
We always need to keep our pantry full. We have been really blessed – Meijer gave us some Simply Give cards, so we’ve been able to go shopping with those. With the COVID, they gave our agency $10,000. That goes a long way. Then we have people who donate. We also have a route where our driver picks up from Walmart, Aldi, Little Caesars, Kroger, Target, Meijer. That happens every day. We are bringing in about 12,000 to 13,000 pounds of food every day. Very rarely does it get thrown out.
I think it’s awesome the support we get from the community. We probably couldn’t make it without that support. We have approximately 130 volunteers when we’re open. We live by our volunteers.
We’re always looking for volunteers.
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