Food Pantry Blog: Tuesdays with the Anderson Center Crew
Tuesday mornings were very special in the pantry. That was when we stocked the shelves for the coming week and also prepared the take out packages for the homebound shoppers.
The Anderson Center for Autism has Community Integration Outings which they operate out of their Lifelong Learning Center in Saugerties. Every Tuesday morning at 10:00 a.m. sharp Nathan drove a large green van with Gary, Jai, Marcos, Mattie, Jonah, Robert, and Isaac to the pantry. They came to stock our shelves with as much food as humanly possible. These young men were always enthusiastic about stocking the shelves, breaking down the boxes, and hauling the food out of the storeroom. They took to their jobs like ducks on a junebug. They finished up what Leticia was unable to complete in the hour from 9:00 to 10:00.
Their job began with Jai bringing out case after case of food from the storeroom.
“What food does the pantry need today Thurman?”
“Jai, let’s start with 10 cases of jelly, 10 cases of peanut butter, all the cases of cereal you can find, and 15 cases of beans.”
After Jai got the cases of food into the pantry, the guys stocked the shelves under Nathan’s direction. Nathan enthusiastically offered individual supervision to each team member.
Marcos and Mattie tore down boxes in the yard outside the pantry. Tony Cannistra always helped with this project. They loaded all the cardboard into Vanessa, the Grand Caravan, to be carried to the dump. Vanessa was always totally packed with flattened boxes at the end of the job on Tuesday mornings.
Everyone worked as quickly as possible. Our job had to be completed by noon because we were required to vacate the building then. At noon the take out volunteers were allowed to pack the canned goods for next week’s bags.
As soon as the shelves were totally stuffed with canned and boxed goods and as soon as all the boxes were broken down, Nathan drove the van around to the building and loaded up a half dozen or so take out bags in the back of the vehicle. Then, off the Anderson crew would go to deliver food to homebound households.
Thank you for reading this post.
Peace and food for all.
Thurman Greco
Woodstock, NY
For The Most Part, Everyone Working In A Pantry Needs Healing on Some Level
“Pantries offer companionship, exercise, meaning, and purpose.”
Janet Poppendieck
No one just wakes up one day and says “I think I’ll go down to the local food pantry and volunteer”. People spending time in pantries, either as volunteers or shoppers, travel down a path toward a pantry. For the most part, the people need healing on some level.
Some needed physical healing. Volunteers occasionally came to the pantry so ill they were barely able to make it into the building. When this happened, I had a specific job for them. They were stationed at the Items of Dignity Table offering toilet paper, shampoo, razors, etc. Shoppers were allowed to take one roll of toilet paper and one other item.
For several months we had a volunteer who was excellent with the shoppers. Each week, Diane slowly walked the 2 blocks to the pantry and then worked in the hallway a couple of hours until she got enough energy to return home. “Don’t forget your roll of toilet paper, Judith. We’ve got some hand cream today. Can you use that or would you prefer tooth paste?”
When she finally couldn’t work in the hallway anymore, we had no one for the station. So, I relied on Robyn to help.
Thank you for reading this post.
Our next post will focus on Robyn and the many tasks she performed.
Peace and food for all.
Thurman Greco
Family of Woodstock Comes to the Pantry’s Rescue Two Years in a Row
Family of Woodstock was a real lifesaver for our pantry those first two Decembers I was the coordinator. The first year word spread that our shelves were empty. I got a call from Tamara Cooper.
“Thurman, can you come over here immediately? We just got a donation of food from someone and we have no place to put it. If you come over right now, you can have it all.”
Can I come over immediately? WOW I was there! It was glorious! I stuffed my car with grocery bags filled with canned and boxed goods of every kind. Thank you Tamara Cooper.
In October of the following year, I saw Michael Berg at a meeting at Mohonk Mountain House. I went over to him, introduced myself, and told him that Decembers were grim in our pantry. In December I got another call from Family. This time we were given a large number of Hannaford’s holiday gift boxes filled with pasta, tomato sauce, tuna fish, chicken noodle soup, etc. Thank you Michael Berg. Thank you to everyone at Family of Woodstock. Thank you to Hannaford’s. And, thank you to everyone who buys a gift box of food for the hungry at Hannaford’s.
By 2010, I was ready for August and December. I finagled a storeroom out of the building committee of the Woodstock Reformed Church. I even got permission for a refrigerator to go in it. The storeroom effort was a total scene – especially the refrigerator. I got permission from the pastor’s secretary who gave me the go ahead because everyone was out of the building.
Looking back at the whole event, I realize that Divine Guidance removed everyone from the building that morning. If anyone had been there the pantry would never have gotten even the storeroom…much less the refrigerator. Thank you God.
Except for the stress that my presence in this space (which was severe) caused the building committee and church members, the storeroom was a wonderful addition to the pantry. We were now able to order food for advance needs during lean months and the refrigerator, even though small, stored eggs.
The storeroom made all the difference. As my grandmother would have said “We were cooking with gas over at the Good Neighbor Food Pantry”.
Thank you for reading this blog post.
Peace and food for all.
Thurman Greco
Woodstock
Grocers, & Manufacturers Can Get By With A Lot Fewer Dumpsters If They Donate The Food And Let The Food Bank Truck Come By And Pick It Up.
All these donations going to food pantries, shelters, etc., are a real two-way street. Donating food is a break-even proposition for manufacturers.
To my way of thinking, it’s more advantageous for a farmer, grocer, or food manufacturer to donate the food to a Food Bank. All the food coming into the Food Bank has been diverted from a landfll. One advantage (or disadvantage, depending on how you look at it) to donating the food is that there are fewer dumpsters for people to dive in.
Some months I’d be lucky and get maybe 80% of what I needed. Other months I would get next to nothing that I needed. When that happened, I thought ahead and got what was available. Hands down, the most challenging month to get food was August because the food drives and food donations are seasonal. I finally decided that food donations are down in the late summer because nobody thinks of Food Banks and Pantries when they’re on vacation. One August, I bought 25 cases of water because I could get them and everything else was either scarce or nonexistent. That water came in very handy after Hurricane Sandy visited.
The Food Banks send out refrigerated trucks to pick up the excess. They get it to the warehouse where volunteers sort it and make it available to agencies as quickly as possible. The goal is to feed the hungry with the excess.
The second most challenging month is December. The first two Decembers I was the coordinator were dismal in the pantry because I hadn’t yet learned how to stockpile the food in advance. I was unprepared for this because, for one thing, I didn’t even have a storeroom to put the food in.
When the months were lean at the pantry, I made extra trips to Latham and returned with fresh produce. Fresh fruits and vegetables covered “a lot of ills” in the pantry because the shoppers didn’t have the money to buy fresh foods and they were always hungry for something fresh.
Thanks so much for reading about the food pantry.
Peace and food for all.
Thurman Greco
Woodstock, NY
The Food Coming to Our Pantry from the Food Bank Has Been Diverted From a Landfill
There’s absolutely no excuse for anyone in our great country to go hungry.
The third category was Donated Food. This was usually canned or boxed food in really good condition which manufacturers couldn’t sell or supermarkets had overstocked.
All the cans had labels in good condition and none of the cans were dented.
Popular donated items included Barilla Pasta, Breyer’s Ice Cream, Cheez-It Crackers, Chobani Yogurt, Hellman’s Mayonnaise, Hunt’s Products, Kellogg’s Cereals, Lipton Teas, Nestea, Pepsi products, Progresso Soup, Suave Shampoos, Tide soap, Triscuit Crackers, V-8 Juices.
Co-op was the fourth category. The food in this category was offered at more or less grocery store prices. Coop food supplements the donated food inventory. The Coop food enables the Food Bank to have an inventory which meets the needs of the agencies. Except for toilet paper and eggs, I rarely bought from this category because our pantry simply couldn’t afford the costs. Even so, the eggs were a few cents cheaper than anywhere else and the toilet paper was important to the households with no funds.
Eggs were always a challenge. They’re only available through the pantry in the Co-op section of the catalogue. They were rarely in the refrigerator case at the Food Bank when we went for produce and dairy products weekly. Purchasing the eggs locally was hard because we needed about 150-200 dozen eggs at a time. My main source when we couldn’t connect with the food bank was Aldi. They were about the only store that really didn’t care how many dozen eggs we bought. Price Chopper in Saugerties was a real lifesaver a couple of times also.
One winter I was having a really tough time getting soup. Then, Progresso donated a large load of soup to the Food Bank. Hurrah! After hurricane Sandy, ConAgra sent a generous load of canned goods to the food bank. To this day, two favorite words in my vocabulary are Progresso and ConAgra.
Thanks for reading these Food Bank posts. I hope they’re answering questions for you. Tomorrow’s post will begin with a discussion of dumpster diving and months when we had almost nothing.
Peace and food for all.
Thurman Greco
Woodstock, NY
Bonnie, Michelle, Nora and the Salvage Food Order at The Food Bank
In yesterday’s post, I started the monthly order.
In a good month, I ordered 16 cases each of a large variety of canned/boxed goods: peanut butter, canned beans, canned refried beans, canned green beans, pasta, and oatmeal for example.
In a bad month, I would only be able to get my allotment of a couple of things: tomato sauce, and dried plums, for example.
Bonnie, my primary contact for the Food Bank food orders, spent time telling me politely on Monday and Tuesday that most of what I wanted was already out of stock. As the week progressed, the outlook usually improved. By Friday, some of the stock had been replenished, new merchandise was on the shelves and the order was as good as it was going to get. Michelle and Nora were also available when Bonnie’s line was busy.
These 3 women, Bonnie, Michelle, and Nora, spent their work days on the phone listening to desperate pantry coordinators, soup kitchen managers, shelter directors, ordering food. While they were assisting an agency person on the phone there was always a list of people waiting for their turn to add their needs to the day’s list.
Generally, food items were depleted as fast as they came on the computer screen. That’s why we called throughout the week. Nothing was ever available for more than a day or 2.
“We just got in a shipment of USDA” was music to my ears.
Then would come the order for salvage bulk food categories. These were banana boxes filled with 40 pounds of canned/boxed/bottled foods in specific categories such as fruits and vegetables, condiments, juices, pantry, soup, etc. As a pantry, I was able to get this food at 16 cents per pound. These boxes were wonderful. They were wonderful to me, anyway.
In reality, they were something else altogether.
Salvage food is made up of the dented cans and crumpled boxes that are pushed aside at the grocery store.
They are either collected at the store and brought over by the store itself to the Food Bank or a Food Bank truck drives around picking the food up and taking it to the Food Bank. Food Bank volunteers clean and sort these items. Salvage boxes offer variety to pantries, soup kitchens, and shelters. This is where we get the occasional spice or herb, can of olive oil, box of cooking chocolate, jar of pickles.
Another favorite refrain I liked to hear from Bonnie or Michelle was “I can let you have 5 boxes of pantry today.” Once I was able to order 24 boxes of salvage products. I felt like I was being rewarded by the universe for something I must’ve done right. I never quite figured out what it was that I did. But this I know: life was beautiful that week.
Thanks for reading this post.
There is absolutely no excuse for anyone in our country to go hungry.
Peace and Food for all.
Thurman Greco
Woodstock, NY
Peace and food for all.
Thurman Greco
Woodstock, NY
In the Food Pantry Blog – It’s All About Respect – Part 2
For the followers of the Buddhist, Hindus, and other Eastern religions, feeding the hungry is about selfless service. The pantry had a few practicing Buddhists and one practicing Hindu.
Jo, a Buddhist from Palden Sakya, sometimes came on Wednesday evenings at 6:00 to help bag the bread which Prasida brought from the Bread Alone bakery in Boiceville. Most of the time we had 2 or 3 volunteers to help but occasionally Jo would just bag the bread herself. Stuart Kline sometimes came to help her. When no one was available to help, she didn’t complain, criticize, or appear to judge. Occasionally, if there was time after she packed the bread, she grabbed a broom and swept.
The Hindu, Prasida, was a strong woman of Polish descent. She felt nothing weighed too much for her to carry and no task was too large or too small. Prasida started the day on Wednesday at 6:00 a.m. by driving our truck, Miriam’s Well, to Latham for food. At the Food Bank, she shopped and selected about 2,000 to 3,000 pounds of produce: lettuce, tomatoes, potatoes, onions, baked goods, yogurt, local cheese, fresh milk, mushrooms, carrots, anything organic she could find. She loaded it onto the truck. Then drove back to Woodstock where she unloaded the food off the truck and hauled it into the pantry. After that, she went with Tall Thin John, Bad Back Bob, and Guy Oddo to Woodstock Commons to distribute food there to the residents.
Then, as if that wasn’t enough, Prasida hustled back to the pantry and opened it up promptly at 3:00 as she signed in 200-300 people for the pantry.
Then, about 4:15, Prasida turned her desk job over to Guy and drove off down the road to Bread Alone in Vanessa with Ann King to get the bread. She returned exactly at 6:00 with the Dodge Grand Caravan packed to the roof with freshly baked bread.
Then, Prasida unloaded the bread, and resumed her desk job until the pantry closed at 7:00, when she cleaned the floors. WHEW
Having watched volunteers from the three religions in action, I truly believe the Jews, Buddhists, and Hindus are more active in their approach. I never once heard one Jew, Buddhist, or Hindu try to turn people away or refer to the “unworthy hungry”. “Unworthy hungry” is a term I first heard from a local Lutheran Minister. I learned very quickly in the game that area Methodists, Episcopalians, Catholics, and Dutch Reformed followers were familiar with the label.
So, I suppose that my feeling is that the Jews, Buddhists, and Hindus have owned the concept of “feeding the poor” since the beginning of time. Christians picked up on the “feeding the poor” concept that Jesus taught.
With the next few posts, we’ll focus on the most asked about part of pantry management: where the food comes from.
Thank you for reading these posts in this blog/book. Pantries are hidden away places that more people need to know about.
Peace and food for all.
Thurman Greco
Woodstock
In The Food Pantry Blog, It’s All About Respect
“In the new millennium, our world requires us more than ever to accept the oneness of humanity.” – His Holiness the Dalai Lama
Different religions approach hunger and feeding the hungry in different ways. Christians cannot have pantries without invoking the name of Jesus.
For the Jewish pantry worker, feeding the hungry is more about doing good works…doing good for its own sake. Jews, of course, aren’t concerned with communion. There’s no reward or paying back.
The Woodstock Jewish Congregation took its turn in the pantry twice yearly. At first, when we were struggling with getting cars to caravan the monthly shipment over from Kingston, congregation members formed a caravan of cars and SUVs to bring the food over. Congregation members volunteered to work in the pantry during the month.
One month, Richard Spool simply showed up with lumber and all the tools needed to build foundation platforms for our shelving in the storeroom. He came into the storeroom, did all the work necessary to build absolutely perfect platforms and then left, personifying the feeling I got from the congregation members that their job at the pantry was to do what needed to be done and then, at the end of the month, melt away into the community and remain anonymous until their next turn. There was no quibbling about the pantry serving the unworthy hungry. None of the volunteers even seemed to be on the lookout for the unworthy hungry.
Richard must have liked being in the pantry because, several months later, he joined our board and became the treasurer.
Many of the volunteers left checks in my hand as they went out the door for the last time at the end of their “tour”. They were gracious, cheerful, smart, capable, wonderful. I could not have asked for a better group of volunteers. As a group, I adore Jewish Women. I’m convinced that, as a group, there’s nothing they cannot do.
Thank you for reading this post.
Peace and food for all.
Thurman Greco
Food Pantry Blog: The Church in the Basement
“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” – Matthew 25:35
Every week the pantry attracted several hundred people to the basement of the Woodstock Reformed Church. People experienced community, gratitude, healing and shared food. The isolation often felt by the hungry and homeless was diminished somewhat in the pantry. In fact, the pantry changed all of us for the better. For me, that was church. It was the best attended service in that building each week. In the basement, no less.
This basement pantry opened every Tuesday morning as we prepared and delivered the take outs, and Wednesday and Thursday afternoons when we served groceries to shoppers lined up in the hallway and outside the building. We found ceremony hidden in the way we processed the shoppers through the rooms.
An Episcopalian Priest once told me that the only thing we really know about Jesus was that He fed the hungry. He fed the hungry and then He said to those around him “Now you feed them.”
And, to my mind, that’s what communion is all about: serving everyone who comes.
And, of course, that brings up a whole other issue. As people go down the path to the pantry, they begin to lose things. Life becomes less complicated. One of the downsides of this newfound simplicity is that people become isolated and somewhat cutoff from their communities. As the money goes, many activities go also, one of them being the weekly visit to a church or synagogue. Church/synagogue becomes too expensive, not only for the tithing but also for the other things needed: clothes to wear to the services and other activities, money for the collection plate, things to donate to projects, fellowship activities.
Circumstances encourage congregations to discourage families and individual members at the moment they need it the most. As people no longer fit in, their presence is discouraged. It appears the congregations don’t want anyone to disrupt the ceremony and spiritual solitude in any way.
The closest many shoppers ever got to a church or synagogue service was the pantry line in the basement of the Woodstock Reformed Church. There was a very definite hunger for spiritual connection.
A food pantry is another way of having a religious service. The sharing of the food is the prayer. The distribution of food in the pantry was a spiritual transaction.
Each week I opened the pantry when I unlocked the outside door with a key. The building, housing a beautiful, empty sanctuary was kept locked. The sanctuary was kept locked also. As a pantry volunteer, we were allowed only in the part of the hallway where the pantry and storeroom were located.
In this part of the hallway, shoppers waited for over an hour sometimes in a cramped space to sign their name so they could enter into an even more crowded room to select a 3-day supply of food which they had to make last 7 days.
More than once I heard people ask if they could sit in the sanctuary for a moment. “Sorry. The sanctuary is locked.” I always replied.
Sadly, more than once I heard people in the hallway discussing the beautiful sanctuary, the historical church building. When this happened I always heard the comment: “I hear very few people come to this church anymore.”
Peace and food for all.
Thurman Greco
Woodstock, NY
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Homelessness and Mental Illness: A Comment on Nicholas Kristoff’s Blog
I sent the following letter to Mr. Nicholas Kristoff in response to his Feb. 9, 2014, story in the New York Times about mentally ill inmates in jails.
Dear Mr. Kristoff:
While you were describing the plight of these incarcerated people, I submit to you that the people illustrated in your story are the lucky ones.
As a coordinator of a food pantry in Ulster County, New York, I interact with mentally ill people every time the pantry is open.
It’s difficult for a mentally ill person to navigate in our culture. Many of them end up homeless. On January 31, 2014, we were out in 9 degree weather doing a Point in Time Census of homeless people for HUD. We went under bridges, behind the mall in Kingston, to the cemetery, into abandoned buildings, etc.
Not everyone who is homeless is standing on the street with a sign and a cup. Every time I walk down a street now anywhere, I see inconspicuous and unnoticed homeless people. The sidewalks and streets of America have become one large ward for the mentally ill.
Homelessness accompanies a number of mental illnesses including schizophrenia and bipolar disorders. Mentally ill persons have a tendency to become chronically homeless. According to a HUD definition, a person who’s been homeless at least 4 times in the past 3 years or who has been homeless for more than 1 year, is considered homeless. It’s believed by MentalIllnessPolicy.org that there are over 250,000 seriously mentally ill homeless persons in our country.
The bottom line here is that many people are living on the streets coping not only with the problems of homelessness but also the mental illness they are afflicted with. While a seriously mentally ill person is trying to survive on the streets dealing with things like dumpster diving for food, s/he is also dealing with being robbed, beaten, etc. And, finally, s/he is not being treated for disease.
My conclusion: better to be in jail.
Peace and food for all.
Thurman Greco
