After a successful year of serving many food insecure families, the CHMS food pantry, which opened in September of 2018, opened a Food to Home program starting in June 2019. Throughout the summer, the pantry packaged about 50 bags of groceries a week and delivered them to food insecure families living in “food deserts” without reliable transportation. This program continued this fall and winter, delivering groceries to 8 families a week. Each family fills out a grocery list from items readily available in the pantry and volunteers fill the bags and deliver them. The families receiving these are very grateful to receive these groceries, and have expressed their gratitude through notes such as “Thank you so much, this means everything to me and my kids,” and “Thank you so much, you are a Godsend.” When delivering the groceries one hot summer day, a small 3 year old girl came up to the car and jumped for joy when she heard that we had brought milk for her Mommy. Since about 10% of the students at CHMS are identified as homeless at any given time, this important program helps alleviate hunger in students from food insecure families.
Pictured: Marge and Sherry, two volunteers for the Food to Home program