By Drew Johnson
Every year around this time the volunteers and staff of the food pantry at South County Community Services begin to pine for the food that will fill our shelves in the coming month. The food in storage gets slim after the holidays and it never feels good to lead people through the pantry when the shelves are bare.
I’m being a little dramatic – we DO have food on our shelves, and we will always have enough food to meet our clients’ basic nutritional needs. We get food given to us by Kalamazoo Loaves and Fishes and we are able to purchase food from Meijer using gift cards that they give to us after their Simply Give campaigns. Those sources are extremely important to maintaining enough food to feed 70+ people per week. Donated food, however, is an essential part of the pantry – it adds so much variety and fills in around the staple foods that we make sure to always have available. With the variety of donated food, our clients get to try new foods that they might never have tried before, like hummus, pesto, sardines, or curry, and can easily design a meal that they enjoy eating. We gave out almost twice as much food in 2023 (37,000 pounds) as we did in 2022 (20,000 pounds), so we need all the food we can get!
Another great part about donating food to us is that it all stays in South County! The vast majority of our pantry clients live within our service area, and after weighing and sorting we will be sharing some of the food from the postal food drive with the two partner pantries – one in Schoolcraft and one in Climax/Scotts – that we help support in the South County area.
The Postal Food Drive will be on May 11th this year. You can expect your postal carrier to pass out information cards and bags a week or so beforehand. On the day of the food drive, we will be here at SCCS to receive food from the postal workers who will pick up food all along their routes and drop it off here for sorting. We are happy to take any nonperishable foods that are not expired. Technically ,we can distribute up to a year past the expiration date but we try not to push it.
Last year we got over 7,200 pounds of usable food and we are looking forward to another banner year in 2024!
Did you hear the news?
South County Community Services has announced the ChangeMaker’s Circle! This is a group of people who want to make a difference in our community through donating, volunteering, and advocating for the residents of South County. We will be recognizing members by placing their name on a tree in our lobby and hope to gather regularly to discuss community needs and potential opportunities for change.
For more information, please go to https://southcountycs.com/changemakerscircle or call Drew at 649-2901 extension 4.
