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ancianita

(39,325 posts)
8. Thanks for this! Just started working at a food pantry and learned what they actually do
Sat May 11, 2024, 05:05 PM
May 2024

besides give out food.

The church spent today (1pm - 8 pm) picking up food from the 45 USPS offices in the county. 30 trucks belonging to church members picked up and delivered the USPS food collections to the food pantry. There are around 100 pantries elsewhere in the county, though they're open one day a week or once a month. Still, I'm pretty sure no one in our area goes hungry.

My local church has the largest food pantry in Manatee County, giving out food five days a week from 9 am to 12 pm. It's quite a big operation, with a meat locker and big grocery storerooms. Donating retailers are WaWa, Sprouts, Panera, Winn Dixie & Dollar General. People are lined up by the courtyard entry area everyday, new family members signing up at tables, getting shopping carts and coming to our two windows.

I work there on Fridays, and when people come to our courtyard window I greet them (often in Spanish) then handle "intake" on computer for church records; I processed 100 families yesterday. At the next window they receive bags of donated groceries depending on their family's size; those bags sit on seven large tables around the room I'm in, having been 'assembly line' packed earlier, and continuing through the day's shift. Then as clients approach the parking lot there are also long line of tables with other groceries they can pick out, donated by church members.

I'm pretty sure USPS doesn't itself distribute what it collects. So if it does this kind of thing all over the country, even once a year (I've no idea what the scale of it is) we're using the USPS to do something phenomenally good.





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