What do you do when you’re a 52-year-old grandmother rearing your 8-year-old granddaughter and your monthly income is $497?
FERRIDAY – What do you do when you’re a 52-year-old grandmother rearing your 8-year-old granddaughter and your monthly income is $497?
If you live in Delta Baptist Association, you go to Delta Storefront Ministries, where you can get food, clothing, a Valentines (or other seasonal) gift for your grandgirl, and maybe even a “pretty” for your home – all without spending a penny.
“This is a poor area,” said Ruby Holder, director of the Southern Baptist community ministry center, referring to all of Delta Parish, a long, thin slit of land that borders the Mississippi River. “About half the people in this town qualify” for the food assistance provided by Delta Storefront Ministries. Holder has a filing cabinet filled with applications for food assistance from people whose income should make those of us with more, feel rich.
In response to such overwhelming need, Delta Storefront Ministries is a community ministry center supported by individuals and churches, mostly in Delta Baptist Association, as well as by the Southern Baptist Convention’s World Hunger Funds, and the Food Bank of Central Louisiana.
One woman sends $100 each month. Ridgefield Baptist in Delta Baptist Association recently upped its percentage of giving from 2 to 3 percent of its undesignated offerings, which brings in perhaps $700 or more each month. Other churches in the association give upwards of $30 each month.
Donations include all manner of clothing, plus a wide variety of household items, as well as food. All the ‘goods’ are carefully examined, sorted, and set out, and month by month, said Ridgefield Baptist Pastor Preston Holder, it’s all given away – except perhaps for the wide variety of baskets his wife, Center Director Ruby Holder, uses for wall decoration.
Food is the number one item that draws people to the ministry center, however. The Holders know this. He was a pastor and evangelist, and she a WMU president in 1989 in Jena.
They started a food pantry in an abandoned washateria that soon became a model used by what then was known as the Southern Baptist Convention’s Home Mission Board, precursor to today’s North American Mission Board.
About that same time, the food bank in Alexandria was formed. Within six months the Holders were helping the food bank identify food pantry sites across 11 central Louisiana parishes, to meet the food bank’s goal of having its food available within a 15-minute drive of a person’s home.
“We organized a dozen [food pantries] in Alexandria, and others north as far as Columbia, and south to Oakdale,” Preston Holder said. “East to west, we went from the Mississippi River to the Sabine River on the border with Texas. We had started 63 [food pantries] when we backed off.”
Today, about 80 sites in Cenla serve as food pantries. More are needed, said Jayne Wright, director of the food bank in Alexandria and a member of Calvary Baptist in Alexandria.
“Winn and Sabine – out of our 11 parishes, those two are the most under-served,” Wright said.
How does one start a food pantry?
“The Holders are a real good example of how to run a food pantry agency,” the food bank director said. “The Holders came up with the idea of a group of churches working together on one food pantry, because a small church might not be able to sustain it. It really makes a much stronger member agency [food pantry] that way.”
The Message will be looking throughout this year at food pantries and community ministries centers across Louisiana, but the short version of the “how to” is to apply at your local food bank. The paperwork is pretty basic.
“It takes work, work and work, and a person dedicated to the ministry to run it,” said Preston Holder, after vacuuming the carpeted front half of Delta Storefront Ministries. “You have to love people who sometimes are unloveable.”
Preston Holder strongly suggests having the food pantry at a neutral site, rather than at a church, because he has found over the last 30 years that even when they are hungry, some people won’t go to a church to get food. He has found a way around that, however: Every day Delta Storefront Ministries is open, a worship service takes place there at 10 a.m.
“For some people, it’s the only church they know,” Preston Holder said. “They don’t seem to mind having church here.”
The food bank sends out a list each week of what it has on hand to each of its members food pantry agencies. The food pantry orders and either picks it up, or like Delta Storefront Ministries, pays $75 for the food bank to bring the food to it.
Volunteers are an integral part of the operation.
At the food bank, they unload semis, take cases of food off pallets that have come in, and palletize what each agency has ordered. At Delta Storefront Ministries, inmates from the Concordia Parish Correctional Facility unload, sort and shelve the food.
Other volunteers pack the groceries into one-person, two-person or more paper sacks – 10 lbs. per person; into 50 lb. senior boxes; and into school backpacks for youngsters identified as having insufficient weekend food.
“We help a minimum of 450 – and it’s usually around 480 – families each month with gap groceries,” Ruby Holder said. “It all keys off one person willing to mother the organization into existence. You’ve got to love missions, love people, and have a burden for the poor. If you’re not willing to work hard and love the unloveable, it just won’t work.”