This new effort also encouraged faith communities across the state to work together to take concrete action, including partnering with local food banks, volunteering and mobilizing resources for families affected by the interruption of their federal SNAP benefits, opening church kitchens and pantries, and using worship spaces to distribute food as well as hope.

In a letter to state faith leaders that was shared with Episcopal News Service, Texas Bishop C. Andrew Doyle invited them to take part in this action to feed people, which he called “one of the most fundamental necessities to sustain life.”

“As people from so many faiths, we must take a stand for humanity. We must care for the people in all our communities,” Doyle wrote. Calling hunger “a crisis of human need,” he said, “nourishment should never be political.”

The diocese also organized more than 50 faith-based organizations to sign onto a full-page ad in newspapers in Houston, Dallas and Austin to help publicize both the effort and the need for it.

Every Thursday, St. James’ Episcopal Church in Waimea on Hawai‘i’s Big Island serves free meals for 700 people through its Community Meals Ministry. The meals also include live entertainment. Photo: St. James’ Episcopal Church

[Episcopal News Service] Since St. James’ Episcopal Church in Waimea, Hawai’i, began its Community Meals Ministry in December 2016, over 700 people from the Big Island gather late on Thursday afternoons for a free dinner, live entertainment and fellowship.

The congregation and the volunteers take very seriously the ministry’s slogan, “Building community one meal at a time,” the Rev. David Stout, rector of St. James’, told Episcopal News Service.

“Our ministry is to feed body and soul and to build community. … The lively atmosphere makes you feel like you’re not lonely, even if you’re sitting alone,” he said. “It takes away from that sometimes awkwardness that can come when you’re sitting in a restaurant by yourself.”

Every week, volunteers collect donated food from local farmers, bakeries, ranchers and the Costco in Kailua Kona. The members-only bulk warehouse is the ministry’s biggest donor, giving away hundreds of pounds of fresh meat weekly. The volunteers plan the week’s menu based on what’s been donated. Food collection and prep work begin Monday and continue through Thursday, until it’s time for the 4:20 – 6 p.m. meal.

Volunteer duties range from collecting food donations to vegetable washing and chopping, to packing cookies and more. All the meal preparation and cooking are done from St. James’ kitchen. Some volunteers also box up and deliver individual meals to those who can’t make it to St. James’.

The menu always consists of a vegetarian soup, salad, bread, a protein and a cookie. Mealtime also includes live music and dancing, including performances from a local hālau hula, a school that teaches the Native Hawaiian dance form.

“It’s pretty much a celebration here every week, nothing like the tone of a typical soup kitchen,” Stout said.

The meals aren’t intended as proselytization tools, though they always start with prayer. Stout and the Rev. Linda Lundgren, rector of St. Columba’s Episcopal Church in Pa‘auilo, 20 miles east of Waimea, always wear their collars during the meals and are available for pastoral assistance.

Tim Bostock, co-chair of the Community Meals Ministry, told ENS that the party-like atmosphere is intended to help people feel comfortable receiving a free meal.

“We very much want there to be no ‘hila hila,’ [meaning] no shame in coming,” Bostock said. “In fact, come over even if you’re not in need of free food. Everyone’s welcome to eat and enjoy the good company we have.”

The program runs all year except on Thanksgiving, when the community meals are served at lunch. The meal was canceled once during a hurricane, and it paused for one week in 2020 when COVID-19 restrictions went into effect but then temporarily pivoted to a drive-thru format until social distancing restrictions were lifted. Altogether, the ministry has taken about seven weeks off since it launched nearly nine years ago, according to Bostock.

“I think this is the biggest regular free volunteer event in Waimea, maybe even on this island,” Bostock said.

Bostock is also chair of the Gathering Place building project, an initiative to enclose St. James’ outdoor pavilion for future community meals and other ministries. That way, everyone can comfortably enjoy their meals and live entertainment in a climate-controlled environment. The congregation is working to raise $5.5 million in grants and individual donations this year with a goal to begin the project in 2026.

Bostock said it costs St. James’ $200,000 a year to operate the Community Meals Ministry. Most of that money comes from grants, donations and proceeds from St. James’ volunteer-run thrift shop, which sells gently-used clothes and accessories six days a week.

The successful blueprint Community Meals Ministry at St. James’ is now being replicated at its sister parish, St. Columba’s. There, free meals are served for the community every second Tuesday of the month.

“This is the kind of work that God – Jesus – wants. He wants kindness; he wants love,” Allison Rohfeld, a parishioner and community meal ministry volunteer at St. Columba’s, told ENS. She also has previously volunteered at St. James’. “Nobody goes home hungry when they leave our church.”

Nearly a third of households across Hawai’i’s seven main occupied islands are food insecure. That rate is higher on the Big Island – with a population of about 201,513 people – at 40%.

Bostock said St. James’ is in talks with the University of Hawai‘i’s culinary extension program to eventually offer free courses in how to cook on a budget and how to preserve foods using different preservation techniques, as well as food safety and handling. The courses would be offered at The Gathering Place once it’s built.

“It’s a lot of work, but this ministry is very much needed for many locals,” Bostock said.

-Shireen Korkzan is a reporter and assistant editor for Episcopal News Service. She can be reached at skorkzan@episcopalchurch.org.

Brianna Swanson, far left, Kathy Mahannah, center left, and Grace Mahannah, center right, teach free monthly food preservation classes at St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church in Gridley, California, mostly using produce from the church’s community garden. In this photo, they are gleaning peaches with Vern Hartman, far right, which will be used for a class on different ways to preserve peaches. Photo: Courtesy of Kathy Mahannah

[Episcopal News Service] There’s no excuse for food waste at St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church in Gridley, California. Anything that’s not eaten right away or composted can be preserved, which has become an entertaining and tasty activity for the team of parishioners who teach free monthly food preservation classes, mostly using produce from the church’s community garden.

“We want to be good stewards of what we’ve been given and share it with others. They, too, can be good stewards,” Kathy Mahannah, St. Timothy’s senior warden, told Episcopal News Service. “We grow the food; we eat. We preserve what we don’t eat right away, and we compost what we don’t eat all of and put it back into the garden. It’s a self-contained, full circle of creation care with no added transportation.”

Mahannah is a certified master food preserver, as are her wife, Grace Mahannah, and Brianna Swanson, another instructor. The three started St. Timothy’s “Preserving Food with Friends” program in June 2024. In St. Timothy’s parish hall every first Saturday of the month, except December, they and other volunteers teach an element of food preservation – pickling, different types of canning, fermenting, dehydrating and more – using whatever cultivars, or plant varieties, are appropriate for preserving and in season. 

“Everything we teach is seasonal. When it’s strawberry season, we’ll teach a strawberry jam class. In June, we’ll have cucumbers, so we’ll make pickles,” Swanson told ENS, adding the classes offer many benefits. “Students can connect with people and with orchards to glean free food, or they can pick up food from the community garden and know how to preserve what they’ve gathered.”

During the free food preservation class offered monthly at St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church in Gridley, California, students learn different food preservation techniques, such as pickling for cucumbers and other vegetables. Photo: Courtesy of Grace Mahannah

Despite its tiny size – averaging about 15 people every Sunday for worship – St. Timothy’s congregation is impacting the community of about 7,000 residents with its food preservation classes. Even though Butte County, California, where Gridley is located, is a significant agricultural area, 14.6% of its residents – higher than the 12.6% statewide average – are experiencing food insecurity, according to the latest data from Feeding America. Food preservation techniques can help alleviate food insecurity by extending the shelf life of food, ensuring year-round access to food and reducing food waste while maintaining nutritional value.

The three instructors emphasize food and kitchen hygiene and safety – including knife skills – in all their classes to prevent injury, foodborne illness, spoilage and waste. They explain the science behind why and how much of certain ingredients need to be added to specific recipes, and how to properly process preserved foods. For example, canned tomato products, like salsa, must have a certain amount of bottled lemon or lime juice, or vinegar with sufficient acidity, to kill and prevent the growth of harmful bacteria that cause botulism, which can be fatal.

The instructors then lead a hands-on demonstration and answer questions throughout. Students can customize spices and seasonings to taste.

“We teach you what to do and why you’re doing it. We teach about pathogens and what can be in your food if you don’t prepare it safely,” Kathy Mahannah said. “We want to make sure that after two hours of learning with us, people will go home with best practices and properly vetted recipes.”

All materials are provided, and signup isn’t required. Class sizes average 20 people with some returning students. Children are also welcome to participate, with adult supervision.

Students also get to enjoy free samples of whatever they’re learning to make.

“When we gave samples of sauerkraut and pickled carrots the last time we taught fermented and pickled vegetables, everyone said, ‘this is the best sauerkraut I’ve ever had, and these are the best carrots I’ve ever had,’” Grace Mahannah said.

Kathy and Grace Mahannah also are both master gardeners. Between July 2022 and November 2023, using a grant from the Episcopal Foundation of Northern California, they and other volunteers helped turn St. Timothy’s back lot into a community garden with 20 beds available to rent. Once a week, they host a community composting hub there, and St. Timothy’s recently installed a greenhouse to grow more vegetables year-round. Much of the garden’s produce is used for the food preservation classes. The rest is given away once a month to those in need. 

Other financial donations are used to purchase canning jars, lids and bands, canning salt and other materials for the preservation classes. Nearby farmers donate additional materials and produce. One individual donated more than a year’s supply of pectin.

During a food preservation class at St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church in Gridley, California, students learned different ways to preserve peaches, including canned peach slices, peach butter and dehydrated chunks. Photo: Courtesy of Kathy Mahannah

“From a spiritual standpoint, I love the modeling of generosity in giving everything you know, and people are generous in return,” Grace Mahannah said. “It’s a generosity that we’re able to practice as Christians and also community – just being a good neighbor, being someone who is concerned about the community and whatever we can contribute to it.”

The Mahannahs and Swanson said there’s been growing demand for low-sugar recipes. They began incorporating low-sugar options, including blueberry rhubarb jam with sugar-free pectin, in their classes beginning with the May 3 session, which covered fruit jams. Low-sugar recipes will also be offered during the pie filling class later this year.

“We’re always looking for new and exciting recipes to try and teach our students,” Swanson said.

She hopes to eventually teach a food preservation class to nearby 4-H clubs and Boy Scouts and Girls Scouts troops, who could use those skills to enter food competitions in the Butte County Fair in Gridley or the California State Fair in Sacramento, which is about 58 miles south of Gridley.

Those children would be following in the footsteps of certified winners. Swanson, for one, took first and second place last year at the Butte County Fair with her pickles.

The food preservation instructors said their favorite preserved foods are dehydrated mango, jams and escabeche – Mexican pickled vegetables.

“It’s all delicious and really fun to make,” Grace Mahannah said.

-Shireen Korkzan is a reporter and assistant editor for Episcopal News Service. She can be reached at skorkzan@episcopalchurch.org.

For 21 years, garden manager Becky Smith and dozens of volunteers have helped Our Saviour Community Garden in Dallas, Texas, produce more than 120,000 pounds of produce to feed hungry people. Photo: Our Saviour Community Garden

[Episcopal News Service] Since 2003, Our Saviour Community Garden, located on the grounds of the Church of Our Saviour in Dallas, Texas, has been providing fresh fruits and vegetables to help feed people in need.

Becky Smith has overseen the 1-acre garden since its founding. In those 21 years, she and dozens of volunteers have cultivated more than 60 tons of food – 120,000 pounds – all grown organically and donated to the Pleasant Grove Food Pantry. The pantry serves an area of southeast Dallas where 25% of children are at risk for hunger.

“It’s using space for what’s going to work best to feed people,” Smith told Episcopal News Service.

Food from the garden makes a big difference to clients of the food pantry, Martha Doleshal, its executive director, told ENS. Up to a third of the pantry’s fruits and vegetables come from Our Saviour, she said.

“The vegetables are very popular,” Doleshal said. Leafy greens like turnip and collard greens are a special favorite of their older clients. “They enjoy the fruits and vegetables they grew up with … and they know how to cook them.”

The pantry serves 400 families a week from different cultural backgrounds, and to help them learn how to prepare vegetables new to them, Smith provides recipe cards, Doleshal said. That includes items that may be new to people, like eggplant, Austrian winter peas and amaranth, an ancient grain.

Individuals and families may also tend their own garden plots on the same 1 acre cultivated by Smith and the gardens volunteers.

Fruit trees grow across the church’s total 4 acres – old pecan trees that are in front of the church mostly feed the squirrels that get there first, Smith said – along with plum, pear and fig trees whose fruit goes to the pantry.

Pumpkin vines along the fences got their start in the pumpkin patch at St. James’ in Dallas. Since 2022 St. James’ has delivered its unsold pumpkins to the garden after Halloween. That first year they put as many as they could into the compost bin but still had pumpkins left, Smith said, so she suggested placing them by the fence.

A mother and son from the Dallas Young Men’s Service League plant seeds in the garden. Photo: Our Saviour Community Garden

Over the winter they decomposed and dropped their seeds, which sprouted in the spring and brought forth new pumpkins. Again this summer, mature gourds from those vines were given to the food pantry.

When asked, Smith couldn’t say how many varieties of fruits and vegetables the garden produces but guessed it to be in the hundreds. Dozens of varieties of heirloom tomatoes are among them, chosen because they have hardy genes well-adapted to hot, dry Dallas summers like this year, when not a drop of rain fell for three months, she said.

The garden has access to city water, but it’s expensive, she said, so irrigation water mostly relies on a cistern that collects up to 4 inches of rainwater when it does fall. Volunteers use drip tape to add moisture and mulch to hold it in the ground.

This summer the garden did use some city water to keep some younger fruit trees alive, but everything else had to survive, or not, without it.

The garden does not receive support from the church – Smith said it doesn’t have an actual budget – but it does bring in money from its annual March plant sale. She and volunteers save seeds from year to year, where they get their start in the garden’s greenhouse until they are repotted into individual containers for sale. It also receives money or donated items, including fruit trees a few years ago from The Giving Grove, which helps to create small orchards in urban areas to produce food for hungry people.

A designated Jubilee Ministry of The Episcopal Church, the garden received Jubilee grants in 2012 and 2018.

It also is part The Episcopal Church’s Good News Gardens and has been featured in Brian Sellers Petersen’s book, “Harvesting Abundance.” He told ENS by email that Our Saviour Community Garden “is one of the best examples of church land stewardship that in turn supports the community in countless ways.”

Smith keeps the garden thriving with the help of a dozen regular helpers, including two families that care for the flock of 10 hens, folks she calls her “chicken tenders.” Special needs students in Dallas Independent School District high schools help out every week. Regular volunteers include students from other area high schools and colleges, as well as from other groups.

Smith said she believes that every person who comes to the garden – to help produce food or in need of it – is there for a reason. “I hope they take away something from that,” she said. “It’s just such a blessing to be where I can share what God gives us.”

— Melodie Woerman is an Episcopal News Service freelance reporter based in Kansas.

A volunteer crew from Netflix, recruited by L.A. Works, spends a warm August morning revitalizing the Edendale Grove garden, a Seeds of Hope project next door to St. Paul’s Commons in Echo Park. Seeds of Hope is the food justice ministry of the Diocese of Los Angeles. Photo: Janet Kawamoto

[Diocese of Los Angeles] Building garden benches, raised beds and picnic tables, not to mention planting, pruning, composting and other tasks, kept a crew of volunteers from Netflix, the streaming channel, busy on Aug. 22 at Edendale Grove, the Seeds of Hope garden in Echo Park.

Seeds of Hope, the food justice ministry of the Diocese of Los Angeles, since its founding in 2013 has provided fresh produce to undernourished people through its food distribution programs – currently about 2.2 millions pounds a year. Among other services, Seeds of Hope staff teach healthy cooking and nutrition education classes, and help churches, organizations and individuals establish gardens to provide food for their communities. It also hosts a master gardener training program through the state university system and works with seven hospitals as a nutrition referral service.

Seeds of Hope, now in its 11th year, recently saw a change of leadership as founding executive director Tim Alderson retired. Steven Trapasso, who holds a master’s degree in public health from Tulane University in New Orleans and has been a Seeds of Hope staff member since 2014, succeeded Alderson in January. Trapasso briefed the January 2024 meeting of Diocesan Council on the agency’s most recent accomplishments; a report is here. A March 2024 Episcopal News story about the leadership transition and current projects is here.

The Netflix volunteers came to Seeds of Hope through L.A. Works, “our longtime partner that sends us interested volunteers for our events on a regular basis,” Trapasso told The Episcopal News. Volunteers have worked in Seeds of Hope’s gardens, distributions centers and its annual Thanksgiving event. “[L.A. Works] was approached by Netflix to do a garden workday in Los Angeles. L.A. Works asked if we’d be interested, and we said, ‘Heck, yes!’”

The offer came at a time when Seeds of Hope was transforming the Edendale garden from a labyrinth layout to raised beds, “to grow more food and also to hold workshops,” Trapasso said, “because most families we would be teaching are going to be growing in either containers or raised beds.”

Seeds of Hope is entirely funded by grants from various government and nonprofit organizations. Since the Covid pandemic, Trapasso explained, Los Angeles County “has repurposed funding they had set aside for gardening to food recovery and distribution, which meant the garden in Echo Park has been without a main funding source.” Since then, keeping up the garden has required the help of volunteers from L.A. Works, the community compost hub crew, the master gardener program, and corporate volunteers such as those from Netflix. “So, whenever we have the opportunity to build more beds, grow more food, engage volunteers, we jump at the chance,” Trapasso said.

On Aug. 22, Trapasso said, “the L.A. Works group and Seeds of Hope crew arrived around 7:30 a.m. to set up the garden and bring all the tools and materials out so we’d be ready to start [the work] right away.” The Netflix crew arrived at around 9 and after a brief orientation began tackling projects: building garden benches and raised beds, setting up irrigation lines, composting, planting, pruning, fertilizing. Another team got the food pantry at St. Paul’s Commons next door ready for its regular Friday distribution.

“We got a lot done,” said Trapasso. Between 9 a.m. and noon, the crew built two picnic tables, three benches, two benches with built-in containers for plants, pruned 10 fruit trees, composted 400 pounds of green beans, trimmed and fertilized the banana trees, and tended the existing raised beds.

“We installed irrigation in the raised beds which will allow us to grow more efficiently and effectively,” said Trapasso, “because when plants know they can count on watering at regular intervals, they thrive.”

More about Seeds of Hope and volunteer opportunities is here.

Church members Nancy Brown, left, and Tom Bell, along with rector the Rev. Laurie Garramone, right, stand in front of St. John’s, Johnstown, New York, with One Church Street, the future home for St. John’s food ministries behind them. Garramone is dressed as an astronaut as part of the church’s effort to raise the final $1 million needed to finish renovations of the needed space, which she has dubbed a “space mission.” Photo: Facebook/One Church Street

[Episcopal News Service] For the past 30 years St. John’s Episcopal Church has hosted the only food programs that serve the city of Johnstown, a community of 8,100 people northwest of Albany in upstate New  York – a food pantry that was started by the local Interfaith Council and a Sunday noon community meal.

In 2014 they decided those programs needed room to expand and to be accessible to people with disabilities, and in December of that year, St. John’s took the first step in making that dream a reality. For $80,000 they bought the building next door, which had housed the city’s former YMCA. They named it for its address, One Church Street, and saw it as a gift to the community.

“We signed the paperwork on Dec. 20, and the next day we put a red bow over the door of the building with a huge gift tag,” the Rev. Laurie Garramone, the church’s rector for the past 13 years, told Episcopal News Service.

Since then, an initial renovation plan estimated at $1.5 million has increased to more than $3 million, largely fueled by increases in the cost of construction materials that began during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, early on church leaders decided not to have the church take on any debt for this, so renovations are taking place only when funds are available to cover costs.

So far, the church – which has an average Sunday attendance of about 100 – has raised $2 million, all of it given by parishioners, community members, and local businesses and foundations. And Garramone said plans to raise the final $1 million have begun.

St. John’s members have remained committed to the construction, she said, because their food programs fill a real need in Johnstown and in Fulton County. Nearly 15% of the county’s population lives below the poverty line, meaning they earn less than $30,000 annually for a family of four. The poverty number for children is even higher, at 21%. Garramone said one in five children in the county are food insecure, which the United States Department of Agriculture defines as not always having enough food to maintain an active, healthy life. For adults, that number is one in eight. In 2022, St. John’s worked to address that need by providing a total of 44,000 meals between the two programs.

To date the $2 million raised has provided One Church Street with a new windows, a security system and an accessible entrance. It’s also funding the current work on first-floor renovations to house the food pantry, church offices and a new “food as medicine” program to teach healthy eating. Garramone said she was frustrated to learn that the price tag for completion of this phase of construction had jumped by about $300,000, but she remains certain they’ll raise that, too, and those spaces will be completed by Easter 2024.

On a mission to fund remodeling of more space

The final $1 million will remodel One Church Street’s former second-floor ballroom into a large dining room and commercial kitchen for the Sunday noon meal, so it can expand beyond the 400-plus meals it currently serves monthly. It also will provide for the installation of an elevator and the creation of a second-floor multipurpose space that will be available for use by the community. “People could have bridal showers there, or birthday parties,” Garramone said.

To make that final amount feel more manageable, Garramone suggested to the building steering committee of five church members – none of whom are professional fundraisers – that they break $1 million into smaller pieces. The church now is seeking 1,000 people or businesses to each give $1,000, an effort to finish the space that she dubbed a “space mission.”

To help make the point in a fun way, Garramone bought an astronaut suit online for $80, complete with helmet, which debuted on Nov. 28 during the church’s “Giving Tuesday” effort that came with a community-focused twist. To express their thanks for the support provided by people in Johnstown, she and church members Tom Bell and Nancy Brown handed out 200 breakfast bags across town. They sometimes tapped on the windows of cars stopped at red lights to offer food gifts back to the community.

Volunteers prepare the Sunday community meal on Nov. 26 in the cramped basement kitchen at St. John’s. Renovations to One Church Street will include a modern commercial kitchen and expanded, accessible seating for diners. Photo: Facebook/One Church Street

She since has worn the suit to speak with high school students beginning a food drive, and while she knows it’s a gimmick, it’s both fun for her and attracts attention. “It helps our community connect with our real, genuine and essential ‘mission’ of nourishing our neighbor,” she said. So far, they’ve raised $100,000 toward the final $1 million goal.

While the thought of eventually having raised more than $3 million still amazes her, Garramone said as someone with virtually no fundraising experience, she along with her congregation have simply been doing their best to live out what together they see as God’s calling to serve others.

“We know that to feed people who articulate a need for food creates an expansive vision of the kingdom of God as it is lived out here on Earth, and specifically in Johnstown, New York,” she said. “Access to good, nutritious food is a physical, ethical, practical and spiritual necessity, and our prayer is that we are meeting the needs of our guests in each of those ways.”

–Melodie Woerman is a freelance writer and former director of communications for the Diocese of Kansas.

Volunteers help sort and bag food for distribution at the Woodstock Pantry, a ministry of All Saints Episcopal Church in Portland, Oregon. Photo: Andria Skornik

[Episcopal News Service] When All Saints Episcopal Church in Portland, Oregon, saw a need in its community for a new feeding ministry during the COVID-19 pandemic, dozens of volunteers helped launch and run a makeshift food pantry, which supplemented the free hot meals that the congregation already served every Saturday. Now, the congregation is making a permanent investment in the pantry, with plans for a new building that will house the growing ministry.

It is known as the Woodstock Pantry, named for the church’s Portland neighborhood. After the start of the pandemic in March 2020, All Saints began operating the pantry out of a 30-foot shipping container that it converted into a food storage unit. Volunteers also used the church’s pews as a staging area to fill grocery bags. They distributed the bags in an alleyway next to the church to recipients waiting in their cars.

In those early days, about 100 people a week came for the food, much of it provided through All Saints’ partnership with the Oregon Food Bank. Since then, the demand has risen, and about 300 people a week now are served, according to the Rev. Andria Skornik, All Saints’ rector.

“We feel we’re called to do this,” Skornik told Episcopal News Service, and making the recipients feel welcome has been as important as providing them with healthy food. “A number of people really feel like the pantry is their community, and one person said, ‘This is my church,’ even though they don’t come to the worship services. They feel that they’re a part of it.”

Construction on the new building is expected to begin soon, and the congregation hopes it will be complete and ready for use by early 2024. The accessible 25-foot-square structure will have plenty of space to store the items delivered by the food bank and other community and commercial partners. Large awnings on two sides will shelter volunteers from rain or sun as they greet guests and give them the bags of food. As a finishing touch on the building, the congregation plans to hire an artist to create an eye-appealing mural on the wall that will face out to the neighborhood.

The project is estimated to cost $225,000. “We’re kind of in the home stretch trying to finish out the funding,” Skornik said. In addition to donations from the congregation’s 230 members, the project has received grant funding from the Episcopal Church in Western Oregon, as well as the Oregon Food Bank and Lowe’s, the home improvement retailer.

Construction is expected to begin soon on a new 25-foot-square building next to All Saints Episcopal Church that will house the Woodstock Pantry. Photo: All Saints

The efforts to turn the ministry into a reliable, sustainable food source come at a time of economic uncertainty for many in Portland and across the United States, particularly after the expiration earlier this year of several forms of increased federal benefits and protections enacted during the pandemic. It isn’t clear what direct effect that reduced support has had on the individuals and families who All Saints serves, though Skornik said the Woodstock Pantry saw an 87% increase in participating households this year from February to August.

Organizers of Woodstock Pantry also are prepared to step up their efforts if low-income households begin feeling a financial pinch from the looming federal government shutdown, which could freeze certain social safety net programs. A shutdown is poised to take effect Oct. 1 if congressional leaders fail to agree on a plan to continue funding all government operations into the new fiscal year.

There’s no risk of a shutdown at the Woodstock Pantry. More than 60 volunteers typically help distribute food from the pantry every Friday and Saturday, and 15-20 more help serve the church’s weekly hot meals.

“For not a very large congregation, the amount of impact they’re having in the community is incredible,” Skornik said. “They’re involved in the neighborhood, and also in being a community not just for worshipers but for other community members.”

– David Paulsen is a senior reporter and editor for Episcopal News Service. He can be reached at dpaulsen@episcopalchurch.org.

An aerial view of the mobile food pantry in Bryan, Texas, operated monthly by volunteers from local churches and organizations that have united to form an anti-hunger coalition in partnership with the Baylor Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty. Photo: Rob Johnson

[Episcopal News Service] Episcopalians from the Diocese of Texas, ecumenical partners and food pantries have teamed up with the Baylor Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty to form a data-based coalition to reduce hunger in Bryan, the county seat of Brazos County, northwest of Houston.

The coalition’s goal is to not only eliminate hunger in the moment, but also in the long term.

“We need to be generous in providing food immediately to people who are hungry, but we also need to be working for justice in the sense that we won’t need food pantries in the future, because it’d mean that [everyone has] the means and resources to purchase food on their own,” said the Rev. Daryl Hay, rector of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Bryan.

The coalition, which formed in June, consists of secular and religious-affiliated organizations and churches, including St. Andrew’s, local protestant churches, Brazos Valley Food Bank and Santa Teresa Catholic Church, all located in Bryan. St. Thomas Episcopal Church, St. Francis Episcopal Church and the Canterbury Episcopal Student Center at Texas A&M University and Blinn College, all located in College Station, have also joined the anti-hunger coalition.

While the coalition is still in its infancy and members brainstorm how to approach long-term hunger alleviation, a team of volunteers from St. Andrew’s and partner churches operates a monthly mobile food pantry out of the local Boys & Girls Club of Brazos Valley’s parking lot in Bryan. The pantry feeds about 400 families monthly, most of whom are Latino, according to pantry site coordinator Mary Johnson, a founding member of the food coalition and parishioner of St. Andrew’s. Approximately 70 volunteers from all of the churches and organizations involved with the coalition help run the pantry each month, which is operating on a temporary two-year budget and expected to close before summer 2024. 

“We’re following the gospel and loving our neighbor … But that promise from our local food bank is only for two years,” Johnson said. “We need to help the people after we stop our pantry.”

The team of volunteers from St. Andrew’s and partner churches established the mobile food pantry after some lay leaders, including Johnson, participated in a “transformation cohort” program hosted by the Houston-based Episcopal Health Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded by the diocese to collaborate with community partners and congregations to provide research solutions to improve the overall health of people residing within the diocese’s radius. The foundation seeks to help local communities find local solutions to address health-care related problems.

“We’re challenging our congregations to move beyond transactional action, instead working with formational action,” said Willie Bennet, the foundation’s congregational engagement officer. “Often [addressing health] stops at a charity work, and it becomes just a transaction, but the usefulness cannot be one-to-one or be born out of a need that doesn’t exist anymore.”

The Episcopal Health Foundation’s “transformation cohort” program helps lay leaders build relationships in their communities by encouraging them to observe everything happening around their church. The foundation then matches congregations with consultants to help them navigate new ministries. The lay leaders at St. Andrew’s, which partnered with the Baylor Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty — an organization that researches and teaches evidence-based solutions to end hunger that’s housed within Baylor University in Waco — noticed that the Latino population in the Bryan-College Station metropolitan area is growing, and many of them are undocumented and therefore do not show up in the U.S. Census data.

The undocumented population also doesn’t show up in the Map the Meal Gap data conducted by Chicago, Illinois-based nonprofit Feeding America, a nationwide network of food banks that feed millions of people every year through community-based agencies, including food pantries. The Baylor Collaborative uses the data from Feeding America to search for areas of concern in Texas.

In Brazos County, 14.2% of the population is food-insecure, which is higher than Texas’ overall rate of 13.7%, according to data from Feeding America’s Map the Meal Gap. The percentages are higher for people of color.

A woman and her son, longtime volunteers, sort and bag fruit at the mobile food pantry in Bryan, Texas. Photo: Angelita Garcia-Alonzo

With new knowledge acquired from the Episcopal Health Foundation and the Baylor Collaborative — as well as by seeing how many families were arriving at the mobile food pantry every month for assistance — lay leaders at St. Andrew’s were ready to initiate a community-wide dialogue, and the hunger reduction coalition was formed in Brazos County.

The first meeting introduced the Baylor Collaborative to the Bryan-College Station community and provided an overview of the collaborative’s work with other anti-hunger coalitions. The second meeting discussed gaps noticed in the food systems locally in Brazos County. St. Andrew’s hosted both meetings. Some of the people who’ve attended the coalition meetings and offered to volunteer are food donation recipients themselves, according to Johnson.

“In order to address hunger and to have our communities be hunger-free, we’re going to require multiple agencies, multiple organizations across sectors, faith communities, government, universities, nonprofit sectors, businesses — all working together to address food insecurity in a coalition and identifying gaps in the system and beginning to address those together,” said the Rev. Andrew Terry, area missioner of the Diocese of Texas.

Even though the undocumented Latino population doesn’t show up in any data, they’re not elusive within the local community. Thousands of them are parishioners at Santa Teresa Catholic Church, a Roman Catholic parish located in Bryan’s Spanish-speaking “barrio” — inner-city — that serves most Latinos in the community, according to Angelita Garcia-Alonzo, the church’s social concerns minister. More than 3,000 immigrant families from Latin America, including more than 1,000 children, are parishioners of Santa Teresa. Some of those parishioners volunteer at the mobile food pantry every month.

Garcia-Alonzo told Episcopal News Service that Santa Teresa doesn’t physically meet the city’s legal requirements to establish a food pantry or soup kitchen on church property, so parishioners are encouraged to go to already-established food pantries in town; however, she said, many of them have been hesitant go to the food pantries, including St. Andrew’s, because they’re located in wealthier neighborhoods.

“These non-Catholic churches are in neighborhoods where [Latino immigrants] do not circulate, unless they go there to clean houses,” Garcia-Alonzo said. “And the food pantries are only open for a short time during hours when people go to work.”

The mobile food pantry has consistently served hundreds of Latino families every month since its founders followed Garcia-Alonzo’s suggestion and began operating its mobile food pantry from the local Boys & Girls Club’s parking lot, located “smack in the middle of the ‘barrio’ where the Latinos live.” The Boys & Girls Club of America is a national nonprofit that provides voluntary after-school programs for children. 

Garcia-Alonzo said all Christians should “put our faith in action and welcome the stranger” by working together to feed the poor because individual congregations can’t do all the work alone. She also said she always reminds parishioners that Santa Teresa works with local Episcopal churches to help them, and they’re grateful that St. Andrew’s reached out to “build a bridge.”

“Jesus calls us to serve the least among us, and [undocumented Latinos] come to this country to work, to put food on the table for their children,” Garcia-Alonzo said. “[The parishioners at Santa Teresa] are very grateful for the work and the fellowship and for the amount of resources that the Episcopalians put in every month.”

Over the summer, the coalition sent out surveys to community members to assess what areas of food security need to be prioritized. Based on the 70 survey responses reviewed during a committee meeting on Aug. 31, the coalition will prioritize establishing a phone number and marketing campaign for people in the community to contact for food assistance. Part of that work will entail gathering available resources to notify community members what’s available to them. A proposal to implement the phone number and marketing campaign will be made at the next coalition gathering scheduled for Sept. 26 at St. Andrew’s parish hall. If approved, the goal will be to pilot the phone number and marketing campaign by the end of 2023.

Volunteers sort through bags of produce to distribute to people at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church’s mobile food pantry in Bryan, Texas. Photo: Rob Johnson

On Oct. 5, volunteers will present the coalition’s progress and what they’ve learned so far at the Texas Health Summit in Austin, a gathering of health leaders from across the state to network and share innovative ideas and effective health practices. In early 2024, members of the coalition plan to participate in a training offered by the Baylor Collaborative to help them more effectively address food insecurity in Brazos County as a team.

-Shireen Korkzan is a reporter and assistant editor for Episcopal News Service. She can be reached at skorkzan@episcopalchurch.org.

The North Des Moines Community Fridge, launched by North Des Moines Mutual Aid, has been housed in this shed at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church since September 2021. Photo: Lizzie Gillman

[Episcopal News Service] Many Episcopal congregations run food pantries to collect and distribute food to hungry neighbors in need. The pantry at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Des Moines, Iowa, is actually a shed, and it functions a bit different from the typical feeding ministry.

For starters, the shed at St. Andrew’s is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, both for community members dropping off food and others looking to take home some of the donated items. More notably, the small structure that sits next to the church is equipped with a refrigerator, so visitors can receive perishable items like milk, eggs and produce, as well as nonperishable canned and dry goods.

Its official name is the North Des Moines Community Fridge, part of a network of about 45 similar locations around Iowa’s capital region. Since September 2021, when St. Andrew’s first provided the space for the shed and its refrigerator, the congregation has partnered with local organizations to interact with and support its surrounding community.

The refrigerator in the shed outside St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church is regularly stocked with a variety of perishable foods, along with pantry shelves for nonperishable foods. Photo: Lizzie Gillman

“It is an easily sustainable way to come together as a community to feed one another,” the Rev. Lizzie Gillman, St. Andrew’s priest-in-charge, told Episcopal News Service. “It requires many hands to be at work, and we as a congregation have come quickly to understand that we cannot do it all. It takes all of us.”

As she spoke with ENS by phone, she could see the shed through her office window and described in real time the hub of constant activity. Someone had pulled up in the church parking lot and opened the vehicle’s trunk to donate food. Another person, who had been waiting in a nearby car offered to help unload the trunk, placing some food items in the shed while selecting other items to take home.

“The shed is often empty,” Gillman said. “Food does not stay on the shelves long.”

The need is clear. Food Bank of Iowa, an affiliate of the national network Feeding America, reported serving a record of nearly 170,000 individuals in January, noting that food insecurity has been on the rise in Iowa. Last year, an average of 287,000 Iowans received assistance through the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, formerly known as food stamps.

Then last month, Republican state lawmakers passed a bill making it more difficult for Iowans to receive SNAP benefits by expanding identity and financial eligibility checks. The bill passed over the objections of a group of more than 200 faith leaders, including at least 24 Episcopalians. “Feeding the poor is a universal value shared by all major faith traditions and all cultures,” they wrote in a letter to the state’s governor and legislative leaders, calling it a “moral, religious and humanitarian” issue.

Gillman said she has seen the need in her own community, on the northwest side of Des Moines. “Food insecurity has risen substantially over the last two years, and we are expecting it to rise again after the current legislation,” she told ENS.

The deployment of community refrigerators is a relatively new approach to feeding the hungry in the Des Moines region. A driving force in those efforts is the nonprofit Eat Greater Des Moines. It was founded 10 years ago to find new ways to combat hunger, with an increasing emphasis on “food rescue,” which aims to reduce the amount of food that ends up in the garbage.

To preserve that food for distribution to people who need it, Eat Greater Des Moines helped create the first community fridge in December 2020 through a partnership with Sweet Tooth Farm. Now the model has spread across four counties, with most of the refrigerators maintained indoors at apartment buildings, city halls, libraries and other public spaces.

“It doesn’t take much,” Executive Director Aubrey Alvarez told ENS. “The big part of it is just making sure everyone’s on board with it and know how it’s going to run.”

Alvarez’s organization has received grant money in the past to help purchase many of the refrigerators, which are little different from ones you would find in a home kitchen and cost about $800. Eat Greater Des Moines also offers to help community groups seek their own grants while developing a plan for maintaining community fridges.

The main benefit of the refrigerators is their accessibility. They “really are ‘take what you need, leave what you can,’” Alvarez said, adding, “they’re successful because of the community.”

The North Des Moines Community Fridge is maintained by the congregation at St. Andrew’s but is open 24 hours a day for anyone to come on their own to donate or pick up food. Photo: Lizzie Gillman

Local support has been critical to the success of the North Des Moines Community Fridge, which is one of only a handful of sites in Eat Greater Des Moines’ network that are located outdoors and accessible 24 hours a day.

The shed originally was established by a group called North Des Moines Mutual Aid and located on a residential property a few blocks away from St. Andrew’s. When the city officials warned it couldn’t be maintained at that location, St. Andrew’s offered space on its property, Gillman said.

By coincidence, the moving company chose a Sunday morning to transfer the shed to the church – right as the congregation was concluding an outdoor worship service.

“When the shed rolled up attached to the trailer of a pickup truck, we were just finishing Communion,” Gillman said. “It was almost as if it was a continuation of the worship service. … We were able to bless the congregation and the shed.”

The shed is just big enough to fit the refrigerator and some shelves for nonperishable food. St. Andrew’s had to add an external outlet to the church to plug in the appliance. The shed also was insulated so food wouldn’t freeze in the cold Iowa winters.

Eat Greater Des Moines recently committed to including St. Andrew’s in its weekly deliveries of donated food from commercial providers, though Gillman estimates 90% of the food in the shed is provided by church members and other nearby residents. Donations must follow some basic safely guidelines, including that it be packaged and labeled with expiration dates.

St. Andrews, with an average Sunday attendance of about 50, is in a low-income neighborhood on the edge of a business district, Gillman said. The North Des Moines Community Fridge is plainly visible from the sidewalk and bus stop. Apartment buildings and rental duplexes are plentiful, and many of the people who drop off and pick up food live nearby and come by foot.

“It has become a great way to become a better neighbor, by getting to know our neighbors in the community,” Gillman said. “We’re meeting a lot more people in the area because of the fridge.”

A sign on the shed reads “Solidarity not charity” and “We take care of each other!” Gilman underscored that maintaining this food ministry is ongoing commitment, not a one-time donation.

“We encourage people, if they want to donate to the fridge, to make it part of their spiritual practice for their daily living,” she said. For example, someone might choose to buy an extra half gallon of milk every Friday and bring it to the community refrigerator.

“The main goal is to be able to feed our community and to reduce barriers when it comes to getting access to food.”

– David Paulsen is a senior reporter and editor for Episcopal News Service. He can be reached at dpaulsen@episcopalchurch.org.

St. John’s, Boulder, Colorado, will be the site of a letter-writing campaign April 23 by members and others in the community urging U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet to work for greater SNAP benefits in the upcoming Farm Bill. Photo: Chris Williamson

[Episcopal News Service] This won’t be an ordinary Sunday at St. John’s Episcopal Church, Boulder, Colorado. On April 23, in addition to attending worship, members will gather to write letters or sign postcards or even make artwork to tell U.S. Senator Michael Bennet how they want hungry people to be helped in the 2023 Farm Bill being considered by Congress.

The Farm Bill, which last was passed in 2018 and is up for renewal this year, covers a variety of farming, forestry and food programs, but the largest share of its expenditures goes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Formerly known as food stamps, SNAP provides monthly grocery benefits to more than 41.5 million low-income people.

Wayne Grider, who organized the church’s effort, told Episcopal News Service he expects adults, teens and children in the congregation, as well as people from other area faith communities, to take part. Once the written pieces are complete, they will be blessed on April 30, and the church is seeking an appointment with Bennet in his Denver office, where the materials will be delivered in person.

Grider said the letters will urge Bennet, who is a Democratic member of the Senate committee that is drafting the bill, to make SNAP benefits accessible to more people and to cover more nutritious food, as well as to make certain the United States can respond to food issues overseas. He noted that with inflation, SNAP dollars now buy less food, hurting hungry families. And in areas like Boulder, where the cost of housing is high compared to other parts of the country, families are struggling to pay rent in addition to buying groceries.

He added that in February, SNAP recipients also lost added benefits that had begun in March 2020 to help them during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Food Research and Action Center, a nonprofit that advocates for polices that help alleviate hunger and poverty, calls the combination of rising prices for food, heating, housing and transportation a “hunger cliff.” It notes that the group hit hardest are older adults at the minimum benefit level, who saw their monthly SNAP benefits fall from $281 to $23.

Parish members’ written appeals are taking place in conjunction with Bread for the World, a Christian advocacy organization that seeks to influence decision makers to work to reduce hunger and promotes letter-writing campaigns to help churches be advocates. And according to an email from the Rt. Rev. Dan Edwards, former bishop of Nevada who is serving as bishop-in-residence at St. John’s Cathedral in Denver, seven other Colorado Episcopal churches are planning similar letter-writing efforts efforts – including one at the cathedral taking place at the same time as the one in Boulder – along with Lutheran, Baptist, Presbyterian and AME congregations.

Advocacy for those who are food insecure

St. John’s advocacy on the issue of hunger grew out of a parish social justice retreat earlier this year led by the Rev. Julia Domenick, St. John’s associate rector, and the Rev. Marc Smith, a priest-in-residence. Domenick told ENS that parish members had studied justice issues online for the past two years, and the retreat brought people together to explore where they thought God now was calling them to act. Out of that came a parish commitment to look at food insecurity, among other issues.

The USDA defines food insecurity as a lack of consistent access to enough food for every person in a household to live an active, healthy life. In 2021, almost 34 million Americans suffered food insecurity, and Domenick said the number in Boulder County is 25,000 people, including 5,000 children.

Keeping SNAP benefits available to as many people as possible also is a priority for The Episcopal Church’s Office of Government Relations, which represents the policy priorities of the church to government officials in Washington, D.C. In a statement provided to ENS, Patricia Kisare, legislative representative for international policy, said, “While The Episcopal Church has parishes throughout the country involved with critical feeding ministries, the problem of hunger is systemic and beyond the scale of charitable organizations alone,” which makes the SNAP program essential in helping feed people. “We advocate against proposed cuts and imposing burdensome restrictions that would lead to more Americans being unable to put food on the table.”

Kisare said the Farm Bill also authorizes all of the United States’ international food programs, “which provide food assistance to communities during food crises and help to address long-term food security needs of the most vulnerable populations around the world.” She noted that millions of people around the world continue to face extreme levels of hunger, and that The Episcopal Church is advocating that these programs be reauthorized and funded so the money is there when they need help.

–Melodie Woerman is a freelance writer and former director of communications for the Diocese of Kansas.