Photo courtesy of Epiphany Lutheran Church
The issue of hunger is not normally battled with markers and stickers, but these art supplies play an important role in the PCMA Food Pantry of Pickerington’s mission to engage volunteers of all ages.
“You don’t have to be an adult with a big pocketbook. … It all starts from a brown bag lunch,” says Barbara Meek, the pantry’s director of community relations and development.
She’s talking about the pantry’s annual brown bag summer lunch program.
“From such a simple, inexpensive idea, we are developing kids with great character and compassion,” says Meek.
The project, now in its 10th year, provides bag lunches consisting of non-perishable food to children during the summer.
“With kids being out for the summer who would normally receive a free breakfast and a free lunch (at school), there is a big void,” says Sandi Poyer, social services chairwoman for Epiphany Lutheran Church, which partners with the pantry to collect donations and assemble bags. “The food pantry tries to send them home with as many sack lunches as they have available.”
Grace Lutheran Church also participates in the project. Last year, the pantry was able to distribute 800 bags, which Poyer says is “just a drop in the bucket.”
“Eight hundred for the whole summer, to me, just wasn’t enough,” she says.
Photo courtesy of Epiphany Lutheran Church
In order to match the needs of the community, Poyer and Meek partner with local churches and other organizations to gather teams of volunteers, who fill paper bags with a variety of healthful snacks, including juice boxes, crackers and fruit cups. At Epiphany Lutheran, students in the Vacation Bible School classes assist in this process.
“They have the really little ones color the bags and put stickers on them,” Meek says. “And then they have the older preschoolers … do an assembly line and fill them.”
Meek says the decorated bags are always a hit with the clients.
“When the kids get the colored bags with stickers on them, they love it. And you can say, ‘Kids who are your age helped put these together for you,’” she says. “At the same time, we tell (the children at Epiphany Lutheran), ‘Hey, they loved your colored bag.’”
Fostering these types of relationships through hands-on initiatives such as the summer lunch program is an essential step to increasing volunteerism and involvement in the community, Poyer says.
“I think the more opportunities we put out there, the better chance we have of spreading that goodwill and (desire) to take care of each other,” she says.
For more information about the PCMA Food Pantry of Pickerington and the bag lunch program, visit www.pcmafoodpantry.org.
Amanda Etchison is a contributing writer. Feedback welcome at gbishop@cityscenemediagroup.com.
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