February 21, 2018

Our beloved Barbara Mahoney has told us that the children of the Church of St. Barnabas in Irvington wants to provide us with decorated bags with goodies for Easter like they did last year.  We lined the bags up on the steps leading to the altar last year, and the mothers could take one bag for each of their children.  It made the Wednesday before Easter a very happy event.  Plus we’ll be giving out gift cards for the holidays as well.

Today we were visited again by Giuliana Urrelo from the Westchester Hispanic Coalition.  She always brings important information about the services they offer (help with domestic violence, sexual abuse, housing, employment), and all of their services are free!  She’s helped our clients in the past, and she vows to keep coming every month or so to meet new clients and offer whatever information or advice people need.

Brooklyn Market at Rivertowns Square is open!  And since Rivertowns Square is in Dobbs Ferry, I’m hoping we’ll be able to do food drives there in addition to Stop & Shop, and I’m planning to ask them if we can put a permanent bin there with a sign for people to buy food for the pantry and leave it in the bin.  I’ve looked at Stop & Shop, but it seems crowded.  There’s a bin at Foodtown in Hastings for the Hastings Food Pantry, which gave me the idea.

We’re going to be streamlining our client registration system onto a laptop instead of manually signing the clients in every week.  Just about every other pantry in Westchester County does it this way, and the Dobbs Ferry Food Pantry is coming on board.  We have a small committee of volunteers (my husband included) who have gone to meetings at the Food Bank for guidance on how best to do this, and it will be a big help to us when we submit our statistics to the Food Bank every month.