Thank you to everyone who has given extra donations of food or funding to Patchwork’s food pantry over the last two weeks. We even received some extra pet food donations to share. We have been very grateful for all of this support. The families who have visited our food pantry over the last two weeks have also been grateful for it.
We have seen a significant increase in people visiting our food pantry in the time since SNAP benefits were suspended. Quite a few of these families have been new to the food pantry system, meaning that they normally have been able to get by with the resources available to them. It was a new experience for them to be at a food pantry asking for food.
We did our best to treat everyone with the care and respect that they deserve. Some days our staff found it challenging to keep up with the additional demand, particularly in the main office where everyone needed to check in.
Thankfully, our food pantry and others across Evansville have remained well-stocked thanks to the community’s generosity. This is good, because we anticipate that we and the people we serve will continue to feel the effects of the cutoff in SNAP benefits even after the payments are set to resume. It will take time for things to get back to normal.
In the meantime, the cold snap this week has our clients as well as our staff and volunteers looking toward winter and the special needs that come with it. While we welcome continued donations for our food pantry, we now add cold weather items to our list of needs. These include things like:
- Winter gloves
- Hand and foot warmers
- To-go packs of facial tissues
- Travel-sized lotions
- Hair conditioner in large bottles or in travel size
- Cough drops