Good evening, everybody – yesterday our numbers were a little more sane since we didn’t give out Stop & Shop gift cards. We served 95 families (still a far cry from the 35-40 we were serving a year ago), including 192 adults, 134 children and 34 seniors, for a total of 360 people served. One thing I’ve noticed is that the number of seniors we’re serving has gone way up. I’m very glad about that. It’s tough to continue to live in Westchester County as a senior citizen, and if we can help someone stay here, so much the better.
I received a phone call from the Scarsdale Women’s Club. They did a surprise food drive for us! They got the idea from the Ardsley United Methodist Church after seeing the multiple food drives our friends there have been doing for us. They’ll be dropping the food off this coming Wednesday, and believe me, we can use it. And they’ve promised to check all the food ahead of time to make sure nothing has expired. That will save us so much time and work. Thanks in advance to all those generous members.
All through the summer our clients were receiving prepared meals from a consortium of restaurants known as On The Line, who wanted to provide food for hungry families during the pandemic. Now the organization got a grant to start offering the meals again. In the next couple of weeks we’ll again have a table with prepared meals on it for all our families. These restaurants are all nearby, and we give them a vote of thanks for caring about needy families during this difficult time.
Every Wednesday after the pantry we volunteers get together on a Zoom meeting to talk about how it went. This past Wednesday we were talking about other food pantries who have been able to count on sustaining donors, and we began to wonder if there are people on this list who could do that for us. We do have one person who has been automatically sending us a small donation every month, and she’s been doing it for years. But just the one. Is there anybody out there who could become a sustaining donor for us? It would help a lot to be able to count on a certain amount coming regularly every month.
See everybody at Sam’s on October 15!
Dobbs Ferry Food Pantry 