We are doing quarterly food drives for the Adams County community,
serving the seven food pantries of Adams County for food for those that need
that have no way of financially buying food for themselves.
We have these flyers that we put out and we just went out this past Saturday the 17th
with the flyers on the, put on the doors throughout at Adams County.
We try to put out about 4,000, our goal is 5,000 flyers on any one day
throughout Adams County and we, they have all the instructions along
for the person that gets a flyer and we go out the following week, Saturday,
which will be the 24th to collect the donations that people leave on their doorstep
for us to pick up.
Then we deliver those to the food pantries throughout Adams County area.
There's seven pantries throughout and that doesn't include
the Hanover Council churches that provides food for the Hanover area.
This is just Adams County itself, so there's seven of them in Adams County proper
and that's what we're trying to service are those pantries in Adams County.
With the seven pantries, they're scattered throughout including Biglerville,
York Springs, Abbottstown, East Berlin, New Oxford, and Littlestown,
as well as Gettysburg and we're trying to get food to all of those pantries
and we have our distribution set up or collections set up in five geographic areas
where our members go out to put the flyers out and to try to get food to each and every pantry
and it all depends on what our collections are like, you know, how much the pantries get.
One of the recent things I've heard is the pantries are really in need of dried cereals,
macaroni, noodle type things, foods for on the shelves,
something probably easily prepared by the families.
I guess one other aspect too is we're looking for anybody to team up with us
to help us with this project.
Picking up the food is not the challenge.
It takes a very short time to go around and pick up food,
but it takes a lot of man hours to put flyers out,
so we're looking for anybody that would like to help us put flyers out on a quarterly basis
to help try to expand it to try to get more.
The other report I've heard recently is the pantries are putting out an average right now
of 500 bags of food a week in Adams County
and when you start multiplying that out, that's a lot of food to try to cover
so the pantries aren't short of food.
Recently in the evening sun there was a report by the Red Cross in work,
and I think it was in York County, but they talked about that very need,
that there are more and more families coming out.
We have a few members of our church that have used the pantries on an infrequent basis,
but when they had a need.
And it's real easy to donate simply when you go to the grocery store,
pick up a few extra cans or boxes or whatever of what you normally buy for your family
and then put it out as part of the donation.
My philosophy has always been that as well as people who need food and homeless,
that it happens day in and day out.
There's no one time of year that they don't have a need,
and so these people are in need all the time,
and as you said with the economic situation that we have right now,
we're seeing more people who do not have the finances,
whether it's through loss of job or whatever,
that they need to supplement their resources with something to help keep their family going.
We try to go out throughout the county as much as possible.
Just the sheer amount of miles to cover is hard,
so we usually stay in the more developed areas,
so we don't usually get out on the back roads, the county roads too much.
And so what we do is the best we can,
so the more help we get in the future, the better.
If someone doesn't get a flyer,
would like to donate if they would call.
Myself, my name is again Steve Long,
and my number is 624-7253,
and we'll get somebody connected to them
in whatever area they live in to pick up the food that they would like to donate.
We're going in again in April.
We do this quarterly.
This has been our goal.
We've accomplished it for one year now,
and this coming April will be a one-year anniversary.
We're distributing flyers again on the 4th of April,
and we'll pick up the following week,
so that's where we need to help is to get the legwork to get the flyers out,
because it's hard to imagine that 5,000 flyers is a lot of piece of paper to get out.
