Good afternoon, everybody – yesterday we served 45 families, including 78 adults, 52 children and 24 seniors, for a total of 154 people.
The mail carriers’ drive this past Saturday was eminently successful, and there weren’t as many expired cans of food as in previous years. We really appreciate that because it cuts down on the amount of sorting and throwing away we volunteers have to do. Thanks to all the people in Dobbs Ferry who left food for their mail carrier, and thanks to the carriers who lugged the food to the Post Office, where our volunteers Mary Anne and Ed picked the food up and brought it to South Church. Quite a bit of the food was given out yesterday.
Also successful was a drive at Cabrini of Westchester, organized by Director of Recreation Sheri Gottlieb, which yielded lots of shelf-stable foods (none of which had expired), plus a check for the pantry. The staff at Cabrini has helped the pantry through the years, and Sheri is a shining example of that effort.
Marc Taiano and I attended a Feeding Westchester Community Gathering this morning in Peekskill, which is a chance for pantries to network and rub elbows. There was a speaker from the Pace Women’s Justice Center and a speaker from the Greater New York Hospital Association, talking about a website by the name of www.hitesite.org, which offers guidance and resources about a whole host of services, and the site can be translated into many languages, including Spanish. These speakers offered great information for us to pass on to our clients. Feeding Westchester representative Monique McCoy was there, and she said, “it’s not just about food”. They’d like us to be able to offer more information to our needy clients.
This coming Tuesday is the delivery of the food gathered at Springhurst in its final Kids Can food drive of the year. We’re looking forward to receiving this delivery because donations tend to dwindle during the summer, so the more we receive now the longer our supplies will last.
I’m hoping the people on this list won’t forget us in the summer. We’ll need food, diapers and financial donations throughout the summer (there’s a Pay Pal feature on our website, www.dobbsferrypantry.org).
Dobbs Ferry Food Pantry 