Just Have Faith:

Food Pantry Has Helped Those Who Need Immediate, Temporary Assistance For 25 Years

By Shannon Hicks

Elizabeth Arden Spas may have their famous red doors, but there is a red door located in Sandy Hook that has been the saving grace for countless Newtown residents since a food pantry was set up behind its frame a quarter of a century ago. The door opens to a set of stairs that lead to the undercroft and gathering area for St John’s Episcopal Church. And at the back of that gathering room are a number of cabinets and a few refrigerators and freezers that combine to create the inventory for FAITH Food Pantry.

The food pantry quietly observed its silver anniversary this month. Twenty-five years ago the pantry began offering food to residents who suddenly found themselves in need of some food assistance. A formal celebration is being planned for September, but for now FAITH Food Pantry continues to operate every Tuesday morning and Thursday afternoon, with volunteers welcoming and helping those who cross the threshold in need of a little help.

FAITH, which stands for Food Assistance Immediate Temporary Help, continues to operate from the basement of St John’s Episcopal Church in Sandy Hook, but its mission and its operations are very much the same today as they were in the spring of 1983: to help any Newtown resident who needs food assistance, and to do so without question or judgment. The fact the food pantry is based in a church does not mean that it is affiliated with the Episcopal Church or any religious organization. FAITH could just as easily have been based in a school, a library, or even a private home.

When the Reverend Joan Horwitt arrived in Sandy Hook to become the church’s vicar in 1982, she began to look for a project that would fill a community need, unite the local churches, and provide an outreach project for her own church.

“I was familiar with a food bank project because I came from a church in the Lower Naugatuck Valley where there was high unemployment because of the closing of many factories,” she told The Newtown Bee in February 1986. Establishing the pantry and opening it was one way to find out who and where the hungry families were. When she helped to create the food pantry, Rev Horwitt told The Bee, it was with the idea of trying an emergency food program for the Newtown area for a year to see if it really was needed.

“No one has said what the needs are in this town. We might find there are no hungry people in Newtown,” Rev Horwitt told The Newtown Bee in May 1983, one month before FAITH opened its doors. That turned out to be wishful thinking.

Within six months FAITH provided food for 119 people in 29 families. Two years later, in 1985, FAITH had taken care of 223 people that it knew of.

“Joan believed that church was not only on Sunday, but every day,” Lee Paulsen, a former chair of FAITH Food Pantry and a volunteer who has been involved since day one, said recently. “She had been part of a food bank before and she knew how they worked. She worked with other clergy in Newtown to get this one going, and got it started.”

Founding members came from St John’s Episcopal, Christ the King Lutheran, Newtown Congregational, Newtown United Methodist, St Rose of Lima, and Trinity Episcopal churches. The churches continue to maintain collection baskets for their members to donate nonperishable food for the pantry.

In addition to food donated by the members of the founding churches, by 1992 FAITH began — and continues — to receive regular food donations from additional area churches, schools, clubs, and organizations such as Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Newtown Lions Club, WIN, et al. Sandy Hook School does a lot of collecting for the pantry, as does Sandy Hook Volunteer Fire & Rescue Company, said Mrs Paulsen.

“They are a huge amount of help,” she said of the local fire department. “They organize a food drive during the holiday season every year, and every fire department in town helps us out with that.”

Cash donations have also been regularly received.

FAITH has always been an open-minded, low paperwork group. To this day the people who arrive on the doorstep of St John’s Church are only asked to show a valid form of ID to prove only that they live in Newtown, Sandy Hook, Botsford, Dodgingtown, or Hawleyville. On their first visit clients must only fill out a short form, but do not have to show proof of need or reveal income. Records must be kept so that FAITH qualifies to be part of cooperatives and other food programs. Clients can then visit FAITH once each month.

“We try to supply them for just a month. We can’t help every week, we just don’t have it,” said Louise Andrews, who is one of the current co-chairs of FAITH. She and her husband Richard (“Porky”) have been volunteering for more than 15 years. The couple has been offering help since an invitation came from Huey Quinn, one of the original volunteers, who told them about the pantry.

“We’ve both been helping people all our lives. We thought we’d do this for a little while,” Porky Andrews said.

If clients need more help to sustain themselves, they are referred to Newtown Social Services, which can offer longer term options and also operates a food pantry.

FAITH opened its doors to clients for the first time on June 21, 1983. A letter from Cathy Newman, FAITH Committee chairman, to Ruth Turney, chairperson of Trinity Episcopal Church’s Outreach Commission, dated July 5, 1983, thanked Ms Turney for the $300 donation she secured on behalf of Trinity “to help meet the emergency food needs of local Newtown families.”

“FAITH of Newtown was formed earlier this spring to assess and serve the emergency needs of local Newtown families,” the letter continued. “This program was designed to meet any emergency food need on a temporary and immediate basis, without long questionnaires or pending applications. A second purpose was to refer those with more than a temporary need to the Salvation Army Service Unit and to local government agencies.

“Due to the gracious donation of non-perishable items by the members of participating churches, the pantry was well stocked for the opening day … and will continue to be opened regularly three days a week.”

In addition to the Tuesday morning and Thursday evening hours the pantry continues to be open, FAITH was also open for a number of years on Saturday mornings from 10 am until 1 pm.

By 1992, when the pantry had a steady number of weeks where no clients would show up for food and concurrently the number of volunteers that served diminished, the decision was made to cut FAITH’s schedule back to two days. Hours of operation continue to be Tuesday from 10 am to noon and Thursday from 6 to 7:30 pm.

That first seed money from Trinity, as Mrs Newman described it in her letter, was particularly important to not only balance the first needs of the pantry, but also for advertising.

“Close to 40 posters have been placed in the Dodgingtown, Botsford, Hawleyville, Sandy Hook and central Newtown area, informing local residents of [FAITH’s] service,” Mrs Newman’s letter continued.

The pantry was initially an ecumenical effort, with volunteers representing each of the founding churches. Today the makeup of the volunteers is one thing that has changed over the years. Today’s volunteers “are from everywhere, not just the churches,” said Mrs Paulsen, who has been involved with FAITH since its inception.

Many of the volunteers are churchgoing, but it certainly is not a requisite.

“You do not have to be the member of a church to benefit from the food pantry, or to volunteer. I cannot stress that enough,” said Mrs Paulsen. “We’re housed in a church and this was started by Joan… but we are not church-based.”

In addition to being open twice each week, FAITH also delivers food to homebound people.

“We have one woman who calls ahead, then picks up deliveries and gets them to homes,” said Mrs Paulsen, who has also been known to volunteer her driving time.

Not A Competition

When FAITH opened its doors in 1983, Newtown’s unit of the Salvation Army was already well established. The town had an emergency food closet that was operating at the time out of Newtown Congregational Church, whose clients were referred there by Newtown Social Services.

That food pantry eventually moved to its current location at the Social Services office and it too continues to serve its share of people. Social Services, however, tends to see people who are in need for longer durations. Those who visit FAITH are there because the lead wage earner has lost his or her job, or was injured; food stamps have run out, a welfare check hasn’t arrived, or children are home again to live with parents after realizing that they cannot afford to live on their own, or they visit the pantry with the hope that they can delay moving back home.

“FAITH is not territorial at all,” Nancy Taylor, another long-term FAITH volunteer, said of the people helped by FAITH Food Pantry and Newtown Social Services. “We don’t compete against each other. This is a collaborative effort. We actually do a lot of work with each other.”

FAITH continues to work only through the efforts of volunteers.

“This is a fully volunteer operation,” said Mrs Paulsen. “I keep coming back because I see how it works and I also think ‘there but the grace of God go I.’”

Volunteers see many tears, she said, especially when people make their first visit to the pantry.

“It’s heartbreaking. Especially some of the men, they get very choked up,” said Mrs Paulsen. “But we keep coming down those steps to help them because tomorrow it could be us who need the help.”

The pantry maintains its stock through donations of food and cash.

“We have a lot of help from a lot of organizations who do food collection on our behalf,” she said.

Nancy Taylor, who has been volunteering with FAITH for more than 20 years including serving during the 1990s as co-chairperson, sees many of those efforts.

“The most amazing part of what I’ve witnessed, and is the most rewarding, is how we get the food,” she said. “When food is low, people help. The nicest thing is to get a phone call from someone who says ‘We’ve just had a food drive. Can we come drop everything off?’

“To witness that, time and again, after so many years, reminds us that this is a very special community,” she added. “Something is always working that allows us to always open those doors.”

Nevertheless, there is often the worry that even the pantry’s shelves will one day be empty when someone visits St John’s.

“Different families bring in food on a regular basis, but lately we haven’t been seeing that as much,” said Mrs Paulsen, “nor are we seeing as many groups send money.

“But you see that everywhere. We’re all pinching pennies. You go to the grocery store and spend $100 and you get very little food,” she said. “Imagine trying to live on a tight budget to begin with, and getting even less for your money.”

In 2007 FAITH served 1,226 clients, representing 585 families. Between January and May of this year, the food pantry had already helped 321 families through visits from 852 clients.

“Those numbers started to really, really increase in November of last year,” said Mrs Paulsen. “It’s a very sad scenario. I really hope we get some help soon.”

One saving grace for FAITH Food Pantry is that its volunteers can now supplement its inventory with stock from the Connecticut Food Bank. Shopping there, and at other grocery stores and cooperatives, allows FAITH to offer oleo, peanut butter, chicken, hamburger, kielbasa, and hot dogs. The meat is kept frozen in the large freezers at the pantry.

Louise Andrews and Barb Gates, the current co-chairs of the food pantry, are two of the three shoppers for the pantry. Barbara Lynch is the third. The women use FAITH’s cash donations to shop at the Connecticut Food Bank, and it is those short forms filled out by the pantry’s clients that grant FAITH’s volunteers access to the state food bank. The pantry tries to keep meat and chicken in its refrigerator and freezer, said Barb Gates, who took on the responsibilities of c0-chairing the pantry in 2005, after longtime chair Doris Bulmer moved with her husband to Florida. Mrs Gates and the other shoppers use the money FAITH receives through donations to purchase meat and chicken from local grocery stores. Unfortunately, there is still a dearth of one main food group. Fresh fruits and vegetables are more than rare; they are nearly nonexistent.

“We occasionally receive a donation from a local farmer when they can spare it,” said Mrs Paulsen. “Jim Shortt gave us some vegetables last year, but even farmers don’t have much to give away.”

Today’s Needs

Today, as has always been the case for FAITH, there are three main needs for the pantry’s continued success: volunteers, food, and cash.

Volunteers are needed to help receive, sort, and dispense food at the food pantry when it is open. Today 19 volunteers share the two shifts each week.

“We always take volunteers,” said Mrs Paulsen. “Right now we actually have enough people so people who call to volunteer would be subs, but we’ll still take the help.”

Food donations are always welcome. The pantry welcomes simple foods like tuna, spaghetti sauce, pasta, macaroni and cheese, chicken noodle soup, cereals, pasta (boxed and canned), ravioli, stew, chili, pancake mix and syrup, tomato products, and corned beef or kielbasa. Juice is also accepted, as are treats for kids like snacks and juice boxes.

There is no call for cranberry sauce, canned pumpkin, yams or lentils, pet food, or infant supplies.

“We see people of all ages, from age 3 to senior citizens,” said Mrs Paulsen, “but we don’t see any babies, thank god. I don’t know how we’d be able to help them.”

Cleaning supplies, detergent (for laundry and dishes), shampoo, deodorant, toothbrushes and toothpaste, tampons, paper towels, toilet paper, and other necessary items are also always welcome.

Unfortunately the occasional expired or damaged food arrives at St John’s. Donors may want to remember one of the first general rules laid down for volunteers when their first bulletin was typed up in 1983: “For food: When in doubt, throw it out.”

In addition to visiting St John’s when the food pantry is open, residents have a few locations where they can drop their donations off during the week. The Golden Opportunities office, at 1 Riverside Road Suite 102, can receive donations Monday through Friday between 9 am and 5 pm. Also, the Prudential Connecticut Realty office at 33 Church Hill Road is a permanent drop-off location. The office is open daily from 9 am to 5:30, and donations are welcome any time.

Cash is also needed, and continues to stock the pantry with foods that may not be received through donations. Because FAITH is a 501(c)(3) organization, donations are tax-deductible.

“I can see the difference I’m making,” said Nancy Taylor of volunteering for the food pantry. “You can see it right away, that your work is helping someone else immediately.”

And it is that immediate need and equally responsive answer that was Joan Horwitt’s goal 25 years ago.

For additional information about volunteering, donating or helping FAITH Food Pantry in any way, contact Lee Paulsen at 426-5604.