After feeding hungry people in Woodstock for over 30 years, volunteers at the Good Neighbor Food pantry were asked to leave the pantry’s space at the Woodstock Reformed Church by June 1, when the pantry will close..
This didn’t happen because there were no hungry people to use the pantry. This pantry has been one of the largest in the area since it expanded in the economic downfall of 2008. Before that time, shoppers were mostly a couple dozen single homeless men and Woodstock colorful characters.
With the economic downfall, patronage escalated from 25 people per week to hundreds. Hungry people filled the halls. The line filed out the door into the parking lot.
Before the economic downfall, people came in and got one or two each of four basic items: cereal, tuna fish, peanut butter, soup. About the time that the crowds began to shop for food, the food bank changed the system to include fresh produce and a three-day-supply of food for every person in the household.
People left the pantry with bags of food: eggs, vegetables, fruit, yogurt, items of dignity.
Church members and townspeople never really accepted these changes.
People resented the changes they didn’t ask for. This was understandable. No one likes change, especially uninvited change.
They liked feeling only a few people in town needed food.
They liked thinking the pantry was “theirs” when it really belonged to the Food Bank. After all, that’s where the food came from. That’s where volunteer training came from. That’s where food and rent grants originated.
With the changes in food served came training classes at the Food Bank. Funds became available to assist pantries with rent, and utilities. At that time, the volunteer coordinator applied for and received a $1,000 rent grant to pay the church annually.
The $1,000 rent grant was new for the Woodstock Reformed Church. No food pantry volunteers had paid rent money to help the membership.
At the time, the intention was to increase the amount annually. $8,000 was a long range goal.
$8,000 was not out of line if the refrigerators and freezers were moved from the unpainted barn in the parking lot to the church basement.
A nationally known fundraising guru, Kim Kline, taught interested nonprofit volunteers how to raise money. She based her success on the premise that givers give. She told everyone in the class exactly what to do.
After this class, pantry volunteers in Woodstock did exactly as she instructed.
These fundraising efforts at the pantry made the Good Neighbor Food Pantry a success story. Secrets of successful fundraising are outlined in detail on pages 196 and 197 of the book “I Don’t Hang Out in Churches Anymore.”
The Good Neighbor Food Pantry need not close. There is time to raise the money needed. There are probably still volunteers in this pantry who remember these skills taught by Kim Kline.
There is still time to feed the many hungry people who need this food. The need is greater now than it has ever been.
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Thank you for reading this blog post. Please forward it to your preferred social media network. Share it with your friends.
Thank you for your interest in feeding hungry people. Our need is greater now than ever before.
Have you, or has someone you know, applied for SNAP? SNAP is about all that’s left in the way of assistance for people as welfare shrinks and shrinks.
SNAP is important for you and your household because you’ll be able to get more food with your SNAP card and you won’t be hungry anymore. This can translate to better health.
Are there more days in your month than money? Are you a senior who has outlived your pension, savings, or ability to hold down a job. Statistics tell us that one senior in seven doesn’t get enough to eat. SNAP is one successful way to help your situation.
If you have trouble buying food, now is a good time to apply. If you’ve applied in the past and were denied, maybe you need to apply again. You may, after all, have answered a question incompletely or incorrectly and were denied this benefit because of it. Try again. You might do better this time around, especially if you or someone in your house is disabled or is a senior with medical expenses.
You may be reluctant to apply for SNAP because you don’t know if you are eligible. Or, maybe you applied in the past but were denied. Maybe even you don’t know how to apply and are overwhelmed by the application. You might even have never heard of SNAP and think of it as food stamps.
SNAP is a debit card which offers privacy and is easy to use in grocery stores. If you don’t want anyone to know you receive SNAP, they won’t. Once you are approved, your SNAP allotment will be renewed monthly.
One thing: If you work, you need to know how to meet the work requirements. Some information is needed for you to apply successfully for SNAP. This information comes in several categories.
Proof of income is necessary. You can use pay stubs, social security income information.
Are you a senior? You are eligible for SNAP. If you are a senior, please apply for SNAP benefits. You worked all your life, paid your taxes, contributed to the economy. It’s time to benefit from all of the contributions you made throughout your life.
Identification is needed. This might be a state ID, passport, birth certificate.
Bills help. Bring your medical, heating, water, auto, rent bills.
Your social security number and the numbers of everyone in your household are necessary.
Dependent care costs will help. These include day care costs, child support, being an attendant for a disabled adult.
Contact your local Department of Social Services office for application assistance. If this doesn’t work, contact your Office on Aging or Catholic Charities.
SNAP is important for you if you’re having trouble buying groceries. SNAP helps you pay for the food you need to live a healthy life. When you eat healthier food, you will prevent and control some chronic health issues. This will lower your medical bills.
SNAP is important for your community, too, because when you are able to get food with SNAP, you’ll have cash available to use to pay your rent or buy gas to get back and forth to work.
SNAP is also good for your community because the allotment on your SNAP card brings outside money to your community. The money you bring into your local economy helps farmers, grocers, and local businesses.
When you buy groceries with SNAP, you are not taking money away from someone else who might need it more. There are enough SNAP dollars for everyone.
You can still shop at a food pantry if you are eligible for SNAP.
Get SNAP today!
Be well.
Thurman Greco
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Like many first-time pantry volunteers everywhere, I showed up that morning because someone from the church asked me to come. A slot needed to be filled and I stepped up to the plate when I was asked. I was a foot soldier in the army of the outreach. I tried to live up to my status in the church as a new member. I showed up at whatever activity needed help and did my share. Nothing more.
I had no desire to move up any ladder in the congregation.
On that morning of new beginnings, I had no premonition I would ever return to this pantry room.
I had no plans for this place in my future. I had a profession teaching reflexology, Reiki, and canine massage therapy in a healing space in my home on Tannery Brook.
This was a case of fools rushing. Knowing what I know now, I should have run out the door and never looked back. Mary could have handled the crowd that day without me. In the whole two hours, no more than a couple dozen people visited the pantry.
I wasn’t blessed with any psychic knowledge…certainly not the feeling of danger I felt when I saw the head of the building committee in the hallway outside the pantry months later.
There were no lines in the hallway at the new beginnings of my time there. People wandered into the pantry in groups of one and two to choose from cereal, soup, tuna, and peanut butter.
Never in my wildest thoughts on that day did I envision the pantry hallway filled with hungry people, the tiny room packed with fresh produce and jammed with shoppers.
By 2008, the tanked economy was well underway and waits in the hallway were an hour or more.
The Hunger Prevention Nutrition Assistance Program (HPNAP) passed down feeding guidelines which included whole-grain bread, 1% milk, fresh produce. By 2011, the building committee had rules dictating where people could stand, what bathroom they could use, and what parts of the hallway were off-bounds.
Never did I foresee monthly food deliveries averaging over 12,000 pounds.
Never did I imagine, on that day, building committee members angry over hungry people receiving food according to guidelines set down by the State of New York, the Department of Health, and the United States Department of Agriculture.
I never thought I would spend months grappling with the unworthy hungry, a concept introduced to me by a local religious leader. The concept wasn’t explained. Only the two words – unworthy hungry – were used in a sentence: “You are feeding the unworthy hungry.” This was something I never heard of before. What did she mean? Who were the unworthy hungry?
After that first morning in the food pantry, I drove home, pulled out a little notebook from a drawer and wrote what people said, like real writers do. When I wrote these things down, I felt my grandmother’s presence.
Her spirit was with me in the room. I looked around the dining area to see if someone had entered the room without my realizing it. But, no, I didn’t find a soul. I walked over to a cabinet and began my dialogue journal on that afternoon.
A shopper: “They cut my food stamps again. I don’t know how I’m going to make it. I have no money this month. My car died and I don’t know where I’m going to get money to fix it. If I can’t fix it, I can’t buy a new one either.”
Lillie Dale Cox Thurman spoke to me clearly that morning with emphatic, strong, direct instructions. She went straight to my head: “Write this down! Write this down too! Now…write this down.”
My grandmother, Lillie Dale Cox Thurman, stepped into my life on the first morning in the food pantry and never left. Not even when my mother, Uralee Thurman Lawrence, roared in with prayers and fast, furious, aggressive instructions which I resisted to the bitter end. Under their directions, I joined the crowd in the basement and was soon volunteering regularly.
So, now, I’ve got the second volume, “The Ketchup Sandwich Chronicles,” coming out on this blog.
Thank you for reading this blogged book! Please refer it to your preferred social media network and stay tuned for future chapters!
In “A Healer’s Handbook”, Thurman shares experiences and observations based on years of practice. She focuses on the spirituality of the different body systems, both physical and energetic.
This book offers extensive information on condition and illnesses encountered by healing practitioners. The spiritual connection is explained in every health issue because they reveal a person’s deeper layers, essential for healing.
Healing protocols, helpful lifestyle changes, and affected chakras build on one another.
With information found in this book, you will offer healing to the whole person.
Thurman Greco’s “I Don’t Hang Out in Churches Anymore” will touch your heart as she relates both the joys and hardships of contemporary American life as seen through the eyes of a small town food pantry. This is the story of how one woman in America found God.
In truthful, upbeat, intimate language, these prayers relate events and stories that may sound familiar to you. They are the stories of your neighbors. These experiences reveal joy, love, laughter, pain, surprise.
Do you believe in miracles? There are stories in these prayers that can be interpreted no other way.
The prayers in this book will empower you to pray for yourself as well as others. When this happens, you will discover just how import prayer for others is, as did author Thurman Greco. You will learn more about yourself and your connection to your community. In this process, you will learn more about God.
Miracles, like beauty, exist entirely in the eyes of beholders. Naturally occurring events, they happen all around us like the wind, rain, and sun outside the pantry room. We only need to see them for what they are. They happen when we open our eyes, ears, and hearts to the possibility that they exist at all.
Pantry miracles never change much. Except, they do. They change how we see the pantry and how we belong in it. These humble events change our inner lives. We become responsible for ways to overcome the hunger and homelessness we face.
Pantry miracles remind us it’s never too late to know ourselves and understand the talents we were born to use in our lives.
“No Fixed Address” is dedicated to those in our country with no roof over their heads. See your neighbors, your friends, your relatives, in new ways as they describe their daily lives in their own words.
The people in this book reveal themselves to be brave and fearless as they go about their activities: work, laundry, children’s homework, appointments. Mostly they live like the rest of us. They just have no roof over their heads
Ketchup Sandwich Chronicles tells the story of everyone brought together by the pantry: Hungry people kept moving in a line around the room. At times there wasn’t enough space between the people to even turn around. They got to know each other in sound bites shared between grabbing a can of green beans or a package of strawberries. A sentence here. A sentence there. The children were eerily silent, clutching their mother’s pants leg.
The struggle of each person who came in the door could be felt.
When you read this book, you’ll become intimately involved with rules surrounding the feeding of the hungry, the economy of hunger, the biases of people about pantries, and the taboos of hunger. You’ll get up close and personal with the politics of hunger.
Thanks for sharing this journey with me. Peace & food for all.
Wherever you go, if you’re healing yourself or caring for someone else, you are on a journey. This book is a ticket to your healing adventures.
“Wellness for All” adds a spiritual layer of personal care to every situation in your healing life.
This book enlightens and empowers you with information and insight you can use. The focus is on your health, healing, and wellness. This book gives you a boost to care for yourself and those important to you. “Wellness for All” explores:
• Helpful Lifestyle Changes
• Supportive Healing Concepts
• Healing Questions, Answers, and Explanations
• The Spirituality of your Body Systems and Chakras
• Spiritual Qualities Unique to Different Health Issues and Diseases
My mission is to inform people about hunger in America by writing articles, a blog, and books.
Author’s Bio
I live in Woodstock, New York. My life – all 70+ years of it – has been a journey down a path toward a food pantry serving thousands of hungry people monthly. I feel this because, in this pantry, I’ve been using every life skill
Learned in a part of Texas that looked like it came right out of the movie set of “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” where I spent much of my childhood
Learned in being a mother as I raised two daughters
Learned in getting acquainted with hunger in Mexico and Venezuela
Learned in becoming fluent in a second language, Spanish
Learned in becoming a healer
Learned in becoming a writer
Learned in running a successful business.
But, I didn’t learn all the skills necessary to run a pantry. In the pantry I got up close and personal with the politics of hunger.
As the coordinator of the Good Neighbor Food Pantry during the time that the economy tanked in 2008 and beyond, I, along with many volunteers, served groceries to people as the weekly shopper census rose from 25 people weekly to 500 people weekly. This chronicle explores those events. In order to do justice to this saga, I learned facts, figures, issues, motivations, outlooks.
Melissa Petro recently said it all: “Thurman, you have the cred.”
Thank you for joining me on this journey.
Peace and food for all.
Thurman Greco
“The most important and generous thing any of us has to give as a writer is our own voice, how we experience our lives.” – Hal Zina Bennett
Donate to feed the hungry
Author’s Note
Whenever possible/practical I reviewed the conversations with people who could help reconstruct events, chronology, and dialogue. Based on these reviews, some of the incidents as well as certain events were compressed, consolidated or reordered to accommodate memories of everyone consulted. All dialogue is as accurate as possible to actual conversations that took place, to the best of my memory. The names of some of the characters (mainly the shoppers) were changed. The names of some of the characters were omitted.
This memoir was edited and rearranged over many drafts in an effort to be as accurate as possible. If you read a sentence, page, paragraph or even an entire blog post that you feel is outrageous or untrue, it is nonetheless very real. Everything written in this book/blog actually happened. It’s my story.
Thanks for sharing this journey with me.
Peace and food for all
Thurman Greco
Dedication
This book/blog is dedicated not only to the shoppers at the Good Neighbor Food Pantry in Woodstock, NY, but to the people who shop at food pantries all over the country. You are good, decent people working hard to survive against all odds. To me, you are the face of God.
This book is also dedicated to all the volunteers: those from the congregations, as well as the community. Without you, I would never have had a story to tell. Thank you. I haven’t had so much fun in 40 years.
“We all need to create the story that will make sense of our lives,
to make sense of the daily wasks.” – Nick Flynn
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Acknowledgements
“Some of the most important relationships we chart, from which our spirits profit the most, are those to which we have the strength to say no.”
-Sylvia Brown
Many people helped write this memoir. The real creators of this book are the wonderful people who shopped at the Good Neighbor Food Pantry week after week after week. These individuals and families offered us all an opportunity to heal and grow. Without you, none of us would have even had a reason to be in the building.
The majority of the events described in this memoir took place in the basement of the Woodstock Reformed Church where the pantry room, the storeroom, and the hallway are located. Thank you, members of the Woodstock Reformed Church, for your generous donation of this space for feeding the hungry.
I’m grateful to everyone at the Food Bank of Northeastern New York and the Food Bank of the Hudson Valley for the support and training they offered as I traveled down this incredible path.
The Hunger Prevention Nutrition Assistance Program offered needed guidelines to ensure that people did, indeed, receive the food they needed to live and function in this culture. Thank you for your mandate of a minimum 3-day supply of food for each and every person. Thank you for insisting that pantries offer client choice. Thank you for having policies insisting on fresh produce and frozen foods. Thank you for your commitment to nutritious foods.
I extend my most heartfelt gratitude to everyone in the Woodstock Interfaith Council and the members of the Building Committee of the Woodstock Reformed Church for giving me the strength to continue feeding the hungry at the pantry until I knew in my soul that the pantry was going to be around “for good.”
And, I offer a sincere “thank you” to the residents of Woodstock and elsewhere who showed your support of the mission by sending checks, giving fundraisers, offering verbal support, and donating money to the Sunflower Natural Foods Market every month to honor the pantry. Whenever times were tough, your generosity and support reminded me that feeding the hungry is, indeed, the right thing to do.
Thank you Richard Spool, Rich Allen, and Guy Oddo for putting Miriam’s Well together. Thank you to Prasida Kay for making all those trips in Miriam’s Well. Those were wonderful, beautiful, delicious days that I’ll never forget.
All of our pantry volunteers, over the years, offered me much spiritual growth. A special thanks goes out to each and every one of you. All of you gave 110%.
Thanks goes to Barry, who stuck by me with very few complaints.
He went to the dump weekly in addition to the trips made in Vanessa by myself and the other volunteers.
He went to Hurley Ridge Market for produce every Tuesday morning and brought six to ten boxes of beautiful produce, bread, and pastries to the pantry.
He helped stock shelves when the Anderson crew was unavailable. He drove me to Latham weekly for many months on Fridays and helped load the 1000 or so pounds of canned/boxed goods which I ordered on the Wednesday before.
He occasionally participated in the monthly food caravan, helping to bring the food over from Kingston.
He made sure Vanessa always had gas, regular oil changes, inspections, needed repairs, etc. He never once complained about these maintenance costs.
He was a strong fan of my efforts. However, his support was definitely not 100%. At one point he told me that my job was impossible. “Not even a Marine Drill Sergeant would take on the job of coordinator at the Good Neighbor Food Pantry.” He said once with feeling.
He finally put an offer on the table: The day I walked off the job, he would finance a 90-day trip, wherever I wanted to go.
“Take the Prius and go. Go see the kids. Go to Florida. Go anywhere you want. Anywhere. Ditch the phone so they can’t call you.”
I chose this book instead. What a wonderful gift!
He was also strongly against a public meeting with the pantry denigrators. He felt I shouldn’t participate in the planned spectacle. Once he extracted a promise from me that I wouldn’t meet with them, he prepared a special treat for me of homemade cream puffs. (My favorite – totally made from scratch.) They were delicious!
I took some of them to a board meeting and offered them to all the board members. They devoured every one.
Life does have its little humorous moments. Right?
The blog, www.reflexologyforthespirit.com, is a blogged book. It has information for everyone seeking a healthy lifestyle. It’s focus is the spirituality of health. Used primarily as a textbook for my reflexology students, it offers valuable information for the reflexologist ready to move beyond mechanical reflexology to a more spiritual level. ENJOY!