January 24, 2018

Today we were inspected by the Food Bank for Westchester.  They visit every pantry affiliated with them periodically to make sure we’re serving nutritious food and maintaining the pantry in clean condition.  I’m happy to say we passed with flying colors.  They’ll visit us again 18 months from now.

On Tuesday we received a huge donation of food from the second- and third-graders at Springhurst through their Kids Can program.  The delivery came at a good time, when we were running low on some of our more-popular foods.  They sent us a lot of tuna and a lot of hearty soups (all of which are gone by now, by the way).  Special kudos to Nola Kende Long and Sharon Van Engen for engineering this drive for us.  They’ll be doing it again for us in the spring.  A sincere thank-you to everyone at Springhurst for caring for us through the years.

Anilla Cherian and her fellow team parents are organizing a food drive for us at Stop & Shop for Saturday, February 3 – the day before the Super Bowl.  The team has done this for us in prior years and we end up with an amazing amount of food.  No one can resist the charm of the team players.  Be sure to visit Stop & Shop that day so you can contribute.

Another program at Springhurst that has helped us is the collecting of food that students at Springhurst leave untouched at lunch.  The cafeteria staff had been throwing it all out but they were bothered by getting rid of perfectly good food.  Now, custodian Jose Soto brings it over to us at the pantry on Tuesdays and Fridays and puts it into our refrigerator.  We get a lot of apples, yogurt, cheese sticks, energy bars, etc., and our clients are happy to take it.  Now I heard from Sara Sellitti, who’s on the garden and compost committee at Springhurst, that they’re planning on expanding the program to include food left behind by the students at the middle/high school as well.  So we’ll have even more lunch food to offer to our clients.  Nothing goes to waste.