Community Hope – Food Distribution

Submitted by Kathy Vana, Rehoboth Reformed Church

Category: Outreach

Last March when Covid first started, our lead pastor encouraged members of the congregation to start brainstorming ways we could reach out to our community through the pandemic. Many ideas were shared- start a daycare center in our church for essential workers, provide an educational setting for our middle school and high school students, start a food drive.

We landed on a couple of things. One was to partner with an organization called Community Hope https://www.communityhopemc.org/ which had just received a large grant to help provide food for those in our community but needed sites to distribute that food. We became a host site for a weekly food drive.

Many ideas came alongside this idea- one of our members started creating a devotional to hand out each week. We couldn’t put those papers in the bags but we could hand them out before people drove away. Over the past year, our church has united together to unpack the food truck, sort food, pack bags, distribute those bags and reach out to our community. Someone from our church goes to the discount bread store every week to get bread. At certain times of the year we ask our church to partner in putting together something special. Around Christmas we asked for donations of baked goods. Another time our local grocery store donated gallons of milk so we asked for donations of cereal for that week.

Many who come through the line have expressed their deep appreciation with words like “I never thought I’d be in this situation”. It has been beautiful to see the relationships that have formed among those working the food drive but also with those who come through the line each week. We are truly seeing what it looks like to be the hands and feet of Jesus in our own community.