Food Pantry Blog – Peggy’s Take Outs- Meet some of the homebound shoppers at the Good Neighbor Food Pantry
The people who received the food were all in a situation of need.
With homebound people, the longer a person is uninsured, the worse the health becomes. Some people simply can’t get to a pantry. They lack the health and/or resources to leave their homes.
Most, but not all, of the homebound were elderly. Good nutrition is critical to the health and life quality of seniors. Because of issues related to age, including decreased mobility, limited outside assistance and fixed incomes, the elderly can be especially vulnerable to food insecurity and malnutrition.
The elderly poor desperately need to use a pantry. This group desperately resists visiting a pantry as long as possible. The tragedy here is that food pantries are our tax dollars at work. we seniors have paid our taxes all our lives and now we have an opportunity to get a return on the investment.
When a senior citizen doesn’t get enough to eat, the children and grandchildren suffer because the older person ends up ill due to lack of nutrients. It’s estimated that one senior in four doesn’t get enough food to eat. Only 13% of the persons receiving food from HPNAP supported pantries are elderly.
Joyce is a perky 96-year-old who’s lived in Woodstock for years. She has a caregiver every day now but she really can’t go anywhere anymore so the food she receives is important. Whenever we get to her place, the caregiver has her all dressed up to see us. Her feet don’t work anymore but the brain does and she needs the few minutes of socialization as much as the food.
We have one delivery, a Native American woman experiencing mobility problems. Like Joyce she has a walker but life is still difficult. When she sees us coming, she gets behind her walker and struggles out to meet us.
One day she was coming out to meet us as we drove up and I could tell she wasn’t feeling well. Her usual smile was missing. We looked for something to cheer her up. We found it in the meat box. We found a package of ground bison meat. I honestly don’t know where it came from. Nobody had ever seen this item before. Nor have we seen one since. No matter. When Young Hawk saw the bison meat, she smiled. Her struggle became lighter for the moment.
William had a motorized scooter to get around and a walker also. He had lost a leg to cancer and had a prosthesis. William really needed the food delivery…not only for the food but also because of the social aspects of the delivery. We could always tell when he hadn’t had a good week.
Ann, a 90+ year old woman lived alone in her home in the country. She couldn’t drive anymore, so she really depended on the food. Ann’s favorite pastime in the mornings was chopping and arranging her firewood.
Our board voted that we could not deliver food more than 10 miles out from Woodstock. Clearly, we couldn’t serve everyone.
One couple hitch hiked in whenever they could. They were a darling couple, too. She was Elizabeth Taylor beautiful. He had coal black hair, bright black eyes, and Sylvester Stallone features.
He mostly wore a full length coat in the winter over campers clothes. She wore campers clothes as well. Both outfits included practical hiking boots. His jewelry included a knife with a 7″ blade tied to the thigh of one leg.
They lived five or six miles in from Route 28 in the Big Indian area. So…they hiked the five miles on pantry day to Route 28 and then hitched to the pantry.
When we considered that he was terminally ill and she absolutely never opened her mouth, I don’t know how they made it in week after week after week. But they did. They shopped, got what they could carry and headed back out to Route 28 hoping for a ride home.
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Peace and food for all.
Thurman
Food Pantry Blog – Peggy’s Take Outs – Guy, Rich, Jamie, Prasida, Father Nicholas, the Anderson Crew
Peggy organized delivery teams. Guy Oddo delivered food to four clients. Rich and Jamie Allen had a delivery. Prasida Kay had three deliveries. Laura Rose had two deliveries. Father Nicholas had three deliveries. The Anderson Crew had six deliveries.
Andrea from the Food Bank of the Hudson Valley came out one day and spent over two hours conferring with Peggy and answering all her questions.
Peggy had special food sources for her take out clients. Anyone who donated food to the pantry was donating to Peggy’s Take Outs. (So many people were using the pantry that only case lots were used in the pantry room itself.)
Peggy had absolutely no problem calling up a church and asking for food.
“Hello, this is Peggy Johnson. Can I talk with your pantry representative?”
“Hello, this is Peggy Johnson. We’re really short of toilet paper for our shoppers this month. Can your congregation get some toilet paper for our take outs?”
“Hello, this is Peggy Johnson. It’s your congregation’s month at the food pantry. Can you organize an Items of Dignity drive for the pantry? We really need toilet paper, tooth paste, and razors.”
Nothing stopped Peggy.
Not rain
Not sleet
Not snow
Not 100 degree afternoons
Not power outages.
On a couple of occasions when there wasn’t light in the storeroom, Peggy used a spelunker’s flashlight hooked to her head.
Every Tuesday morning, promptly at 9:01 a.m., Peggy walked into the Woodstock Reformed Church hallway and set up long tables along the wall on which would be placed donated food from the Hurley Ridge Market.
By 9:15 a.m., Barry Greco brought the food from Hurley Ridge Market over. There were usually six to ten boxes in his Jeep: fresh vegetables, fruit, bread, and baked goods.
Peggy, Jamie, Prasida, Laura, Amy, Marvalene, and Leticia went to work immediately, working as fast and furiously as possible. By 11:00, every bit of this food would be sorted in bags for delivery to homebound households. The bags had to all be packed and loaded in cars by 11:30 for delivery because the fresh produce had to be removed from the building by noon.
Hallway tables were total chaos on Tuesday mornings. The Take Out team was stationed in front of the tables packing bags with produce, bread, while the Anderson Crew, along with other volunteers, were moving up and down the halls with carts filled with cases of canned beans, cooking oil, mayonnaise, canned fruits, canned vegetables, crackers, cereal, pasta, etc. Leticia worked quickly to get as much food into the pantry room as possible before the Anderson Team arrived but there was always food which still needed to be brought out by the team.
“Look out behind you Prasida!”
“Hey Jamie, here comes a cart!”
“Where are the oranges? My client loves oranges. I know I saw some earlier!”
Empty cardboard boxes piled up. It took several volunteers working together to break them down. Tony Cannistra, Marcos and Jonah from Anderson, Richard Allen, Guy Oddo, Dr. Tom Dallow, and everyone else we could get to do it, broke down boxes and then, finally loaded them into Vanessa.
The fact that there was never an accident with all the commotion in the hallway on Tuesday mornings proves there are guardian angels and they don’t sleep on the job.
By 1:00, we all changed hats. The pantry shelf stockers in the morning became the afternoon take out crew and packed next Tuesday’s bags with cans and boxes.
Peggy supervised every item that went into these bags. It was no easy task.
It didn’t matter to this crew.
This was a very cohesive, dedicated team of people who realized that if the food didn’t go out the recipients wouldn’t eat.
The food went out.
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Peace and food for all.
Thurman Greco
Food Pantry Blog – Peggy and the Take Outs
“New people somehow suggest to you that your world is really not as narrow as maybe you believed it was. You’re not so limited by your psychological environment as maybe you thought you were.” – Leonard Michaels
The next series of chapters focuses on a very important part of the pantry life which we have not yet touched on: our Take Out Department which served food to homebound residents.
As a pantry, we never planned to deliver food to homebound people in the Woodstock area. But, to make a really bad joke, the building committee of the Woodstock Reformed Church made us do it.
This is the story: Pantries are required to have volunteers available to serve shoppers on an emergency basis if they call and can’t make it to the pantry when it’s open. Well, Good Neighbor Food Pantry volunteers weren’t allowed in the pantry except during select hours on select days. So, we needed an alternative acceptable to the Food Bank. We created a Take Out Department to deliver food to homebound households.
Our Take Out Department became enormously successful. It was also a tremendous amount of work for the volunteers. We began with insufficient structure and a few volunteers lost sight of the guidelines and rules. One volunteer felt that the 10-mile limit included all of her friends living in an area around Route 32 north of Saugerties. She also felt her mother who lived several hours away was on the route and that a three-day supply of food for her mother included everything she could fit into her car on the way up. She was also lax with the monthly reporting.
Peggy Johnson took over the Take Out Department.
Peggy organized all the Take Outs. she called every household monthly to see how things were going. She made great lists of all the foods they would, could, should eat and great lists of all foods they would not, could not, should not eat. Peggy knew her clients better than they knew themselves.
Peggy was strict with the rules. She didn’t have even one client who lived beyond the 10-mile limit imposed by our Board of Directors. Peggy was strict with her volunteers also. She insisted everyone follow the HPNAP guidelines exactly. And…Peggy demanded proper manners in the pantry. One month Peggy dismissed a volunteer on the monthly delivery day. Whew!
We had one young volunteer who was a computer whiz. She really didn’t want to work in the take outs. What she wanted to do was completely computerize our pantry and be some kind of “Jedi” for our lists, etc. Her hope was to computerize our pantry and use this experience to launch other projects for other pantries. (I honestly don’t think she realized how poor pantries really are.)
It was a good idea but never materialized because on one monthly delivery day Peggy caught her comparing tattoos with one of the Hudson Correctional Facility volunteers. Peggy spoke with her and she never saw her again. We never saw her again either.
In our next post, we’ll focus on the volunteers who made the take out department possible.
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Peace and food for all.
Thurman Greco
Food Pantry Blog – What This Blog is About
Recently I was asked to explain what the hungerisnotadisease.com
blog is all about.
Well, for me, this blog has several layers.
First, there is the layer of the food pantry. This is a story in itself: intrigue, expose’, scandal, denial. On some level, the story of the Good Neighbor Food Pantry might as well be a mystery novel.
But, dig deeper. This blog is about the people who visit the pantry weekly…the voiceless people who are becoming more and more in number weekly. This is an incredible story in itself also: intrigue, expose’, denial.
And, on yet a deeper level, this blog is about the spiritual journey we are all on as we experience incredible change in our society. Most of this story is still, as yet, unknown to many, many people.
Because, you see, hunger as evidenced by food pantries, soup kitchens, shelters is still a taboo subject.
So…my challenge is to best tell this story, expose the shame that is being orchestrated by many people, and reveal the denial that many people still persist in perceiving.
What is going to work best?
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Peace and food for all.
Thurman Greco
food pantry blog – Father Nicholas
“Praise be to God.” – Father Nicholas
I first heard about Father Nicholas when a volunteer from St. John’s Roman Catholic Catholic Church asked me, almost in a whisper, if we had any extra food for some priests. Through the grapevine, I heard Heidi Motzkin knew some people (priests?) needing food.
HMMM. Then I heard another story about a group of priests needing food. Things were kind of quiet for a week or two. I didn’t act very fast because, in this business, it really takes a shout to get my attention. Anyway, I kept hearing little whispers so I got really curious. Who are these guys? Where are they? Do we know them?
So, Peggy Johnson, our Take Out Department manager at the Good Neighbor Food Pantry, and I got in the car and off we went! Out on Coldbrook Road in Bearsville is a very special place – The Holy Ascension Monastery. We drove out there and were greeted by a tall thin man with a full beard and pony tail, wearing a black cassock, a tall black hat, and black combat boots.
The story went that the monastery had, for a long time, housed three monks. Then, one day, several monks in the Boston area loaded a U-Haul truck and drove to Bearsville. Several other monks boarded a bus in Boston and rode to Woodstock. They increased the population at the monastery to twenty. The monastery needed extra people because they’re building a large, beautiful Church building on the grounds. I went to their website and saw what a beautiful building it is going to be.
In the confusion of the expansion, everything had been taken care of except, of course, the extra food needed for these priest/construction workers and volunteers.
Food? You need food? Peggy was delighted, excited, enthusiastic. She was on this job right away. A duck on a June bug had nothing on Peggy. Within days (hours?) the Holy Ascension Monastery staff had food. Peggy learned about their dietary considerations, as well as the number of people needing food.
Like a Supply Sergeant in a Mash unit, Peggy learned that the food bank had #10 cans of food. Nothing would do until our pantry storeroom had a whole shelf filled with them for Father Nicholas.
Fresh produce? Father Nicholas came by each week and got all the produce he needed.
Well, it wasn’t long until Father Nicholas and the Holy Ascension Monastery had their food needs straightened out and no longer needed Good Neighbor Food Pantry food. So, as smoothly as greasing a cake pan, Father Nicholas and his fellow monks became part of the volunteer pantry crew. He delivered food to homebound households every week. He brought yogurt to our pantry weekly.
And, as if that weren’t enough, Father Nicholas and the Holy Ascension Monastery became a food pantry for the Food Bank of the Hudson Valley serving food to anyone dropping by: pilgrims, homeless people, hungry people living in the area. The Holy Ascension Monastery is open seven days per week. People are allowed to take what they need and return as often as they need.
And, of course, while all this was happening, every one of us fell in love with the monks. Never in a million years would any of us have met these gorgeous men of God if it hadn’t been for the pantry.
The face of God is everywhere. All you have to do is work at a pantry, open your eyes, and look around.
Is that cool or what?
hunger/homelessness/food pantry – all in only 7 months!
It seems like a blink of an eye – Bonnie and Sean talking about opening a pantry in Boiceville, NY.
Well, it happened…and on September 9, 2013 we opened the Reservoir Food Pantry. From that day until now, April 7, 2014, we worked our fingers to the bone. (Not that we’re not continuing to do so.)
We spent months not only distributing food but processing mountains of paper work, having weekly training classes at JOMA, talks at the library, food drives at the IGA and Walmart, etc.
But, finally, on April 7th, exactly 6 months after our opening day, I felt truly at home. Why?
Seven of us were stuffed in our storeroom shoving cans and boxes of food on shelves in a fairly cramped space. For my money, in order to be a pantry – for real – it’s necessary to shove too many people in too small a space and stack cans as quickly as possible to get the job done as soon as possible.
We were really in that zone. It felt like we were all stuffed in a VW bug.
“Does this can have a bulge?”
“Nah. That one doesn’t have a bulge…the one over there does, though.”
“What about this dent?”
“Be sure and separate the soup cans.”
“Where does the cereal go?”
We’re home. At last!
I offer a special note of gratitude to Bonnie and Sean and their two schnauzers, Prasida Kay, and everyone in the Reservoir area who supported us while we got everything together: The Olive Town Board, the IGA, The Community Bank, JOMA, area residents who donated and are continuing to donate food and money.
I offer a special note of gratitude to the hungry who are checking out our pantry and who are returning.
People who have never visited a pantry before experience many things: fear, apprehension, embarrassment, curiosity, and finally, relief.
Residents in the Reservoir area are all being extremely supportive of our efforts. Thank you for your donations of food and money and time.
One last word: Hang onto your hats everyone. I think we’re on a wonderful ride. Join us if you can.
Peace and food for all
Thurman Greco
Food Pantry Blog – Hunger, Homelessness
Do you remember the recent story about Mary-Faith Cerasoli? Probably not. In today’s world, it’s easy to forget a story with so much information coming at us all day long, every day. Well, for my money her story is one of the most important local articles to appear in the New York Times this year.
Ms. Cerasoli, an adjunct professor of Romance Languages at Mercy College in Westchester is homeless. Corey Kilgannon recently covered her story as she (Ms. Cerasoli) painted a sign – “Homeless Prof” – on a white ski vest, and went to Albany, alone, to lobby our politicians there with a protest against her working conditions.
Her story brought up many questions for me:
Did she make it to Albany?
If so, with whom did she speak?
How was her situation received?
How successful was this trip overall?
What kind of push back did she receive at work as a result of the publicity she received?
Is it possible, now, that someone in power will understand that many people are underpaid?
Is it possible, now, that someone will realize educational institutions need pantries?
Is it possible, now, that other employed homeless people will be motivated to go to Albany and lobby?
Is it possible, now, that she will find affordable housing as a result of her story being made public?
The very short detail in the New York Times pieceabout the unnamed psychology professor who gathers leftovers from departmental luncheons speaks volumes in its brevity. It highlights how little we, as a nation, care about those who teach our children and fellow adults.
Whatever the outcome, the important thing which makes this story so extraordinary, is that Mary-Faith Cerasoli protested. Finally, a hungry person is refusing to be voiceless.
With any luck, Mary-Faith Cerasoli has started a trend.
With any luck, more employed poor and hungry people will travel to Albany.
With any luck, some politician in power somewhere will realize how disgraceful it is that we treat our professors this way…and do something about getting more income for professors and teachers.
Peace and food for all.
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Thurman Greco
The Homeless…..A Few People Working to Change the Game
PETE CAMARATA – As a high school student, he helped collect day-old bread for the homeless
PAWEL ALTHAMER – Instituted a coat drive to benefit residents of the Bowery Mission, a shelter for the homeless in New York City.
ANDREA ELLIOTT – won the George Polk Award in Journalism in 2013 for local reporting for “Invisible Child”, a five-part series appearing in the New York Times which focused on a girl named Dasani, one of 22,000 homeless children in New York City.
ELI SASLOW – won the George Polk Award in 2013 for national reporting for articles about food stamp recipients that the Polk Award judges called “an indelible portrait of American Poverty.”
NORMA RAMOS – “There’s a strong connection between homelessness and prostitution, the endpoint of sex trafficking. All too often children in foster care already feel homeless and graduate into homelessness.”
In the face of New York’s mounting homeless crisis, MAYOR BILL DE BLASIO announced on Friday, February 21, 2014, that his administration is removing hundreds of children from two city-owned homeless shelters that inspectors have repeatedly cited for deplorable conditions over the last decade, official reported.
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Thurman Greco
Food Pantry Blog – If Only….
The inspiration for this chapter came from a quote written by Janet Poppendieck, author of a book about hunger in America entitled “Sweet Charity”.
There’s all this food out there. Most people who know about hunger agree there’s enough food for everyone. If we would stop the push back on this concept, and just feed the people, our lives (everyone’s lives in the whole country) would be very different. Imagine a world without hungry children and grandmothers.
Just for a moment, think of all the ways we can benefit our many people and institutions by using this extra food.
For starters, think of pantries, soup kitchens, shelters, as our tax dollars at work. Much of the emergency food effort is manned by volunteers diverting food headed for the landfill. For my money, this recycling effort works primarily to keep people from starving in the streets.
Now, consider the United States Department of Agriculture. As our country accumulates agricultural surpluses, instead of being embarrassed by the food, life would be better if the USDA could proudly distribute the surplus to those in need. After all, surplus food is an uptown problem. It’s almost impossible to produce exactly what we need. Farms don’t work that way. Weather doesn’t always cooperate. Droughts don’t come by request. Floods have minds of their own. It’s better to produce too much than too little.
Businesses can and should ship excess food to pantries, soup kitchens, shelters. This is a responsible way to dispose of unwanted excess food products. When grocers donate to food banks, they avoid excessive dump fees and accrue tax savings. They reduce dumpster diving.
Universities, hospitals, caterers, restaurants, bakers, schools, can use Food Banks to absorb leftovers. In metropolitan areas, the surplus food can go directly to soup kitchens, pantries. This is both a civic responsibility and community outreach.
Community colleges and Universities can recognize there are impoverished students, staff and faculty in their ranks. Pantries and soup kitchens on campus will make it easier for students and staff to stay.
Elementary, Middle, and High Schools would do well to recognize the poverty among the students and staff. Food Pantries have a definite place in schools. Backpack programs should be in every school to ensure that students have enough food to eat over the weekends and holidays.
Churches, Synagogues, and other religious institutions have opportunities to express concern for their fellow man as they include the poor at the table. Congregations refer to their feeding efforts as outreach. These necessary hunger prevention programs feed people who otherwise would not have enough to eat and they give the congregations a local outlet for charity and outreach programs.
Courts and penal institutions can use this concept by having people work service hours at pantries, soup kitchens, shelters, to avoid or lessen incarceration.
Working at a pantry, soup kitchen or shelter provides service opportunities for people of all ages. The more people donate time, the less isolated these facilities become.
Diverting food from landfills offers communities an opportunity to improve our environment. Besides, why throw away good food?
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Peace and food for all.
Thurman Greco
Food Pantry Blog – My First Visit to the Good Neighbor Food Pantry: Hindsight is Always 20/20.
“So you begin…I began. I picked up one person – Maybe if I didn’t pick up that one person I wouldn’t have picked up 42,000. Just one, one, one.” – Mother Teresa
This morning I met Stuart Kline in Bread Alone. He was at the high coffee bar on a stool right at the entrance. Stuart and I see each other in passing most mornings at Bread Alone.
We exchange the usual pleasantries. What’s happening in Woodstock? Who died this week. It seems that everyone in our age group is dropping dead at the rate of one old codger a week. Some kind of fad, we joke.
Stuart is wearing a beautiful plaid shirt: chartreuse, red, blue, white. Plaid cotton.
Plaid. Floral. He has the distinction of wearing the most beautiful men’s shirts in Woodstock. His sister who lives in Nashville picks them up at a consignment store and sends them to him.
Suddenly – a shock went through me. A memory. Yes! A memory I never knew I had. It must have been one of the colors of his shirt. Who knows? Like a flash of some kind, I remembered the first time I walked into the Good Neighbor Food Pantry.
A new volunteer, I had been assigned a Thursday morning shift with Marie Duane.
I drove over to the Woodstock Reformed Church, parked my car in the parking lot behind the building and cautiously walked in. I had never been to the pantry before. There was no sign on the door so I wasn’t even sure I was in the right place.
I entered the empty hallway and found the first door on the right open. I turned into the room and there it was: a small room, actually, about 12′ by 16′. There were two windows on one wall and a third window on another.
Each wall supported a set of metal shelving units.
Each unit stood six feet high and three feet deep with four shelves.
Most of the shelves were empty. One shelf had cereal. There was a little handwritten note in front of the boxes: person: 1 cereal. family: 1 cereal.
One had a few cans of tuna. Another handwritten note in front of the tuna said: person: 1 can. family: 1 can.
One shelf had a dozen or so cans of soup with a handwritten note: person: 1 can. family: 2 cans.
One shelf held jars of peanut butter. Person: 1 jar. Family: 1 jar.
There may have been other items on other shelves but I don’t remember them.
A small table stood in the center of the room. A metal folding chair was placed in front of each window.
We sat in the chairs, Marie and I, and chatted with one another as people trickled in. We discussed the usual: weather, gardening, knitting, decorating the alter at St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church.
“Hi. How are you today? Will you sign your name here?” Marie asked each person who came to shop.
The shopper signed his/her name and noted the number of adults, seniors, and children in the household. As a point of trivia, most of the shoppers were single, homeless men.
After signing in, the person walked around the room selecting from the cereal, peanut butter, and soup. The selected food was placed on the table and bagged for the person to take home, wherever or whatever that was.
This was my first visit.
At the time, I knew nothing about HPNAP guidelines: offering a three-day supply of food, who could or could not visit the pantry, what food safety rules we followed. I was unaware of these things.
I certainly had no premonition that I would ever even return to this room after this morning’s volunteer effort.
This was clearly a case of “fools rushing in”. Knowing what I know now, I should have just run out the door and never looked back. Certainly Marie could have handled the crowd that day without me. In the whole morning, no more than a couple dozen people visited the pantry.
But, I wasn’t blessed with any psychic knowledge…certainly not the feeling of danger I felt when I first saw Ed Jabbs of the building committee.
So…Marie and I sat and visited with one another for two hours while people trickled in for the few items on the shelves. At 11:00 a.m., we rose out of our chairs, walked out of the room while turning out the lights, closed and locked the door, and went home.
I got in my car, totally unaware of experiences waiting for me in the pantry, completely unprepared for what lay ahead.
Never in my wildest thoughts did I envision the hall filled with hungry people, the tiny room packed with fresh produce and jammed with shoppers.
Never did I foresee monthly food deliveries in excess of 10,000 pounds.
Never did I for one moment imagine the building committee of the Woodstock Reformed Church being irate 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.
Never did I think I would be grappling with the term “unworthy hungry”, introduced to me by local religious residents.
Peace and food for all.
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Thurman Greco
