Nooma #23 – Corner
There is a ministry in our area called Five and Two food. They make it their business to make sure hungry people get fed. Dave, who works with this ministry, had a couple of ideas for our pantry that I thought I would pass on because it is so practical and others might benefit from this information.
The first idea that I thought was outstanding was for church members to dedicate a row in their personal garden to the church pantry. Pantries rarely have fresh produce because it is typically expensive to acquire and doesn’t have a long shelf life. This would take some coordination to make sure the pantry didn’t get overwhelmed with food it couldn’t do anything with. Encourage members to give some of this out that day to the struggling in their neighborhood or the homeless they drive by on a regular basis. We haven’t decided to do this one yet at Northwest but hopefully we will in the next year or so.
The second idea was to build a food planter on the church grounds. We are going to pursue this one. Our 20s & 30s class is going to help maintain this food plot and our church pantry will use this fresh produce to supplement the canned goods we already give out on a weekly basis.
What ideas have you seen work well for the food pantry where you worship?
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side note and a different ministry:
but i love the idea of having a food planter on church grounds, and particular classes or ministries being in charge of planting, caring for, and harvesting vegetables there with intentions of giving it away. and i don’t want to take away from the pantry work, but i couldn’t help but think… how beautiful it would be for that same class to harvest from the garden and prepare a meal together for those who often do without. the sharing of lives that would be made possible around cooking and eating. and for people to understand that this wasn’t just a class that pitched in some dollars and bought some food for homeless people. but they actually worked weekly in a garden for weeks in preparing for these meals. anyway, just thinking out loud.
Could we gather up uneaten KFC Double Down sandwiches and distribute them to the hungry?
Never mind. That would be cruel.