Community’s generosity helps local food pantry
CLIFTON PARK, N.Y. » Troops of Boy Scouts and packs of Cub Scouts were out early last Saturday in the bitter cold fulfilling their oath to help other people at all times.
After first canvassing the northern section of the town announcing the upcoming Scouting For Food Fund Drive on Nov. 16, the Scouts returned to those same streets on Saturday to collect food items the residents were donating to the Shenendehowa Helping Hands Pantry.
The Scouting for Food Fund Drive is a national Scouting effort that helps replenish food pantries.
Thirty minutes after the food drive’s 9 a.m. start SUVs packed with young smiling faces and bags of food items started arriving at the food pantry in the Jonesville Methodist Church, 963 Main Street, Jonesville. Within moments the vehicles were emptied of the bags of foods and overloaded shopping carts moved swiftly into a large room off the church kitchen.
The four-hour collection, inventory, and restocking effort at the food pantry is a vivid example of logistics, preparation, experience and volunteerism. The community’s generosity was on full display at a long row of folding tables inside.
For the next three hours the row of tables would overflow with donated food items which would then be quickly inventoried and transferred to the appropriate food collection points lining the room’s perimeter.
“These should all be filled with boxes of food,” said Helping Hands board member Sheila Krupski pointing to rows of empty shelving in the pantry’s storage area. “After today we expect to be back to where we should be.”
As she spoke, men moved quickly in and out of the room with boxes filled with food items. Pointing to a box stacked neatly with cans of tuna fish Krupski said a week ago the pantry was down to three cans. Krupski said the number of people visiting the pantry has decreased a bit recently.
The Shenendehowa Helping Hands Pantry is available to anyone living in the Shenendehowa School District or the Burnt Hills School District. Krupski said a person’s address rather than any documentation from the government is what qualifies someone to use the pantry.
“If it’s a single, just one person in the family, they can come here once a month,” she said. “It there are two or more in the family they can come here twice a month.”
The pantry’s shelves are filled through donations from local supermarkets, food shops, and food drives like the one by the Scouts. Monetary donations also help pantry volunteers purchase between 1,000 pounds and 1,200 pounds of food each week from the Regional Food Bank of Northeastern New York.
Back in the church program room the food donations continued to come in from the different neighborhoods and fill the long row of tables. One of the volunteers separating the food items was Ella Weldy, a member of the church’s Methodist Youth Fellowship.
“I have a package of polenta,” she said holding the chilled package up. “I don’t even know what that is.”
Weldy’s situation was not unusual.
“We have a lot of Cub Scouts who volunteer each year,” said longtime event director and pantry volunteer Caroline Komoroske. “They try so hard but they’re in first grade so they’re just learning to read. They pick up something unfamiliar that they can’t read and they don’t know which table to bring it to.”
As she spoke two young girls came over holding plastic bottles of a liquid breakfast drink. Neither knew where they should go.
“Oh, I was just looking for these,” Komoroske
said taking the bottles from the girls and dropping them into a big pocket on her apron. “I’ll take care of them.”
Komoroske has been doing this for 20 years and it is around her envelope of calmness that the day’s whirlwind of activity swirls like a micro-tornado.
“The biggest thing is the weather,” she said. “If it goes down below freezing the night before and the bags of food go out to the curb there’s trouble with anything in a glass container. But any way you look at it, this is great for the community.”