The Food Pantry in the Closet – Olivebridge, New York

June 4, 2014 at 7:30 am

“We are all angels for each other.” – Allan Gurganus
Not far from Kingston, New York lies a tiny community in the Catskill Forest named Olivebridge. This little community is tucked away on a side road off of a side road off Route 28. Blink and you’ll miss it. Well, Olivebridge has a pantry. I wish there were more Olivebridge pantries in our country.
Members of the Olivebridge Methodist Church built a small closet outside the entrance to their church building. They installed shelves. They put a sign on the door. Their darling little pantry is open 24/7/365. No signatures are required. No ID is necessary. Need food for a meal? Fine! Show up. Take what you need.
That’s all there is to it.
All pantries are different. Some are large – serving thousands of people monthly. Not all communities need a huge pantry. However, all communities can use small pantries like the one in Olivebridge. These small pocket pantries serving less than eighty people monthly offer a much needed service.
If congregations, schools, hospitals, fire houses, court houses, community centers, senior centers, daycare centers have a closet pantry, there won’t be so many congregations with pantries overwhelmed with lines of people outside their doors.
ATMOSPHERE quiet, rural
SERVICE self service
SOUND LEVEL During daylight hours, birds can be heard singing in neighborhood trees.
FOOD OFFERED On both occasions when I visited the pantry, there were canned beans, fruits, and vegetables. There was also a small assortment of pastas with jars of pasta sauce. Cereal, baby food, and pet food were also available. Non food items included shampoos and an envelope filled with grocery store coupons. Empty grocery bags were on the top shelf. There was no fresh produce available.
HOURS This pantry never closes.
USUAL WAIT TIME none
WHEELCHAIR ACCESS none
TO DONATE TO THIS PANTRY Send a check to Olivebridge United Methodist Church, Pastor Karin L. Squires, P. O. Box 1397, Olivebridge, New York, 12461. The phone number is 845-657-8494. The actual location of this pantry, if you want to bring a food donation, is 5179 Route 213, Olivebridge, New York.
PANTRY AFFILIATION To my knowledge, this pantry is a totally independent facility, operated by members of the Olivebridge United Methodist Church.
FINALLY The Olivebridge United Methodist Church cafe and thrift shop opens on Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. The last time I visited, the menu included hot dogs, orange jello squares filled with shredded carrots, and coffee.
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Thurman Greco

Categories
alleviating hunger, Disaster Preparation, emergency food assistance, emergency food assistance program, Feeding the Hungry, food pantry, food pantry blog, Hunger is Not a Disease blog, Thurman Greco, Upstate New York

Tags
alleviating poverty, emergency food assistance program, emergency food assistance programs, Feeding America, feeding the hungry, food pantry, Olivebridge United Methodist Church

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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

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

Peace and food for all.
Thurman Greco

“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?