The North Coventry Food Pantry Needs Your Help!

I volunteer at the North Coventry Food Pantry and received this heart breaking e-mail. Their shelves are bare and they need to feed 70 local families. If you live locally please consider donating food, money or your time. Also please consider donating for the Make a Difference Day. You can drop off any donations at the yoga studio or contact me and we can meet. If you don’t live in Pa check out your local food pantry and see if you can make a difference there.

On Oct. 23rd the OJR School district is hosting a “Make a Difference Day” event at the middle school to collect food to benefit the North Coventry Food Pantry. Please check the school district website for additional information. Each school will be hosting a collection during the month. There is also an unofficial kickoff to the event this Friday at the OJR football game. They will be accepting donations at the door.

I have just finished packing our food for distribution for the month of October. I have to tell you that in my 5 + years of volunteering for the food pantry I have never seen the shelves so bare. I have attached some pictures for everyone to see just how low we are on food. We are really relying on this food drive In Oct. to help us thru the winter months. We are currently serving approx. 70 families. We continue to have 2 or 3 new families each month. The food we receive each month from the department of agriculture (what we call our State food) has decreased in the past couple of months. It is supposed to be considered a 3 day supply of food for our clients. Last month we only received peanut butter, apple sauce, cheddar cheese soup, juice, and a frozen meat. For the month of Oct. we received apple sauce, egg noodles, dried milk and peaches, orange juice and 1 meat. We are relying more than ever on the donated food to supplement what the state is giving us.

As you can see in the pictures the shelves are empty. If we had to pack for our Nov. distribution with what I have on the shelves the boxes would be very light. I would say we have about 2 months of vegetables and soups left. We try to give 4 cans of each out. We have a 1 month supply (each client only receiving 1 can or box) of the following: fruit, pasta, canned pasta, tuna, peanut butter, mac and cheese, beans, and Ramen noodles. We are completely out of breakfast items, jelly, desserts, and sides dishes. We have not had enough "luxury" items to hand out lately like toothpaste and soap. We have been purchasing our toilet paper and paper towels products for the last few months. We were fortunate to have a monterary donation from Grainger to help us with those items.

Thank you to those individuals, businesses and organizations that continue to support us each month with donations and time volunteering. Please help if possible in making this "Make a Difference Day" event a success for our community.