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Food Pantry - Annual Report
The St. Francis Food Pantry experienced a significant, but planned change in 2012. Working with the San Francisco Food Bank and other pantries in the OMI neighborhood, our coordinators helped develop a process and database to enroll and keep track of client attendance. The reason for doing this was to eliminate the ability to go to multiple pantries each week to get food therefore causing others to go without food.
We now have 186 clients enrolled at St. Francis. We still enroll clients from the zip codes near the church (94127, 94132, & 94112). We have requested that the Food Bank hold our list of clients at 200 maximum, knowing that we will serve at least 25-30 less than that each week. This limit has mostly to do with the space to put the food and distribute it each week.
Another significant change is that we no longer shop for items at the Food Bank. Instead we receive a menu of items each week which include such things as chicken, rice, eggs, bread, and pasta. Added to this menu is our weekly delivery of seasonal produce. This menu is the same for the other OMI pantries. Our clients receive between 12 and 16 food items in varying quantities each week. This fills 2 to 3 standard grocery bags.
Instead of spending between $175 and $220 weekly buying items at the Food Bank we now give a monthly donation of $425 to the S.F. Food Bank to cover the food that is delivered on Wed. If this “donation/menu” plan continues we will need a total of $5100 to cover a year. This is significantly less than in previous years when we purchased our food and were billed for what we bought. We did serve more clients under our old plan, but the quality and amount of protein that we have now is much better and is provided weekly as part of the Food Bank’s menu plan.
We continue to have a strong and faithful group of Wednesday volunteers. We usually have between 20 and 25 workers each week. Our Coordinating Committee is a hard working group of 5: Sally Oh, Susan Reamy, Ed Splichal, Carol Thollander and Rich Trezevant. We always welcome new faces to our volunteer group. If you would like to participate please contact any one of our coordinators.
Thank you to all of you in our St. Francis community who support the food pantry ministry with your monetary donations, your time and your talents.
Carol Thollander