The Soup Kitchen Board voted to start making sack lunches for the Deacon’s Pantry – a food pantry serving about 90 families – as an additional way to support our local community while our kitchen remains closed to the general public for everyone’s safety. We’re following strict guidelines laid out by the Board of Health and the CDC to allow a very small team to assemble these sack lunches to be distributed in the Deacon’s Pantry food boxes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We hope to be able to start passing out sack lunches right outside our doors to our local guests in June, but we’re erring on the side of caution in order to keep everyone safe. When we know more about the state re-opening procedures and the effectiveness of this new guidelines, we’ll make an announcement.
In the meantime, we could use your help! We need volunteers to assemble these sack lunches when we do our partial re-open in June. It was suggested that a team of two people could do the work and that team could work in relative safety and comfort if the team was comprised of individuals who live together – like spouses, roommates, families members, etc. – that don’t need to quarantine from each other. You and your volunteer team mate would be the only two people in the kitchen for your safety. If you were also interested in passing out the sack lunches as well, you could move outside along with our security guard at our regular time from 9:30-11:00 and allow lunch pick-ups through a safe, socially-distanced practice.
Would this interest you? We don’t want anyone to come back to volunteering who doesn’t feel comfortable or might be particularly vulnerable. We simply have found a way to keep volunteers safe and continue to feed the hungry and we could use some help doing it. If you would like to help and have the perfect team mate, please reach out to Loretta Parsons and let us know if you’re able to assemble lunches and distribute them or just want to do one part of this process.
For further information on volunteering with the Soup Kitchen of Muncie, please contact us or call our executive director, Ms. Parsons, at info@soupkitchenofmuncie.org.