HELP St. Vincent de Paul Society Keep Our Food Pantry Shelves Stocked During the Summer!

This summer, please consider the children at home from school and extra food is needed for them!

Can You Help? A message from an SVdP Volunteer…

Always a wonderful surprise when the PRIME truck delivers to us!

This week we received cartons of pasta sauce, clam chowder and some dish detergent. These are always critically needed! If you donate through Amazon, please add your name so we can contact you to thank you and when there is a problem with a delivery. We also received boxes of wonderful cereal, paper towels and some condiments. Thank you, all, for your kindness!!! All of these items are always appreciated and high on our “wish list”.

We are working hard on restocking empty shelves. Our biggest distributor, the Greater Boston Food Bank, is facing staffing issues, so some of our most important protein items are likely to be unavailable, sometimes available only at a high price, and/or packaged in bulk too large for our clients’ freezers.

The need increases. This week, alone, we signed up 3 new families, and during the critical summer months, we feed clients with children who are home.

Remember, when you are shopping, even one bottle of salad dressing, one box of cereal, one jar of pasta sauce, one can of tuna helps us to support our many families.

Thank you! Ursula

We are also so grateful for the ongoing support from parishioners and especially to the children at the 9.30am Sunday Mass!

How YOU Can Help…

Consider donating “gluten free” items, cereal, low salt pasta sauce (Prego), condiments, like salad dressings, ketchup, mayonnaise, laundry detergent, olive oil, taco kits…or potato chips and cookies for summer picnics? The SVdP is grateful for ANY and ALL food donations within the use by date.

Please drop off your food donations inside the back of St. Julia Church or, in the blue bins on the back porch of St. Joseph House, 142 Lincoln Rd. (behind St. Joseph Church.)

If you prefer to give a monetary donation, they help us immensely! Donate here.

Or, donations of checks payable to St. Vincent de Paul Society, may be mailed to: SVdP, P. O. Box 324, Lincoln, MA 01773.

For more information about our organization and charitable work, please see our website www.SVdPLincolnWeston.org

DID You Know?

Since the pandemic, the Society of St. Vincent de Paul’s Food Pantry has been central to reaching our goal that nobody in our community should face hunger or food insecurity.

However, we continue to need HELP so we can continue to provide enough healthy food to our neighbors and to those who work or go to public school in our town. The costs of providing food for our 130 registered families at the food pantry have exploded! In the last two years our expenses have quadrupled and we must rely more than ever on food donations. Read an article about how the Food Pantry’s food expenses are skyrocketing in the Lincoln Squirrel, the online Lincoln news site.

WHO is SVdP and the Food Pantry?

The Society of St. Vincent de Paul, St. Joseph Conference, is a Catholic non-profit organization serving those in our midst, who are in need of food or emergency assistance, or who are seeking guidance about availability of other resources. We believe in putting compassion into action and working on systemic change; we offer person-to-person service to our clients, regardless of their religious affiliation or background. We collaborate with other people of good will in relieving need and addressing its causes.

The SVdP Food Pantry is located behind St. Joseph Church at 142 Lincoln Rd, Lincoln MA. Our clients can choose from a large variety of non-perishable items, paper goods, bakery items, as well as refrigerated and frozen foods. In addition we provide lots of fresh fruits and vegetables. The Food Pantry is open twice a month. In December 2020, 122 households, 299 clients were registered at the pantry and had used the pantry within the last year. We give out approximately 11,000 pounds of food every month.

Even though most of the food comes from the Greater Boston Food Bank, we are very grateful for the much-needed donations we receive from parishioners of our parish, including the children at the 9 AM Mass, and members of the Weston and Lincoln communities. Donelan’s in Lincoln donates bread and bakery items, and First Parish in Lincoln, the Food Project and Land’s Sake donate vegetables to us.