COVID Collaborations
Feeding Sheffield The Rev. Erik Karas Christ Trinity Church, Sheffield
W
hen the pandemic hit, The school told us they had 65 schools closed, businesses families that could use a Friday laid off employees, the meal. We relayed that to the economy crashed, and we knew community and immediately all there were neighbors in need as 65 were sponsored for the first full a result. We also knew that Christ week of the program. We asked Trinity had not budgeted for a the community to do it again, pandemic. We quickly figured out and they did it again. And again that none of our usual ways, like church suppers, could help since we Feeding Sheffield Partners: couldn’t even gather safely in a kitchen to make meals for delivery. • First Congregational Church of As we heard of the growing needs in our community voiced by people in the schools, healthcare, elder services, and other non-profit partners, we also heard the voices of people inside and outside of our church desperate to find a way to help their neighbors in this horrible time.
Sheffield
• The Sheffield Chapel • The Cathedral of St. John the Divine • Our Lady of the Valley Church • Berkshire Bounty • The Rural Health Network of Fairview Hospital
• Council on Aging in Egremont In what was a very short amount of time, those • Council on Aging in Mount disconnected puzzle Washington pieces miraculously came together to form a crazy plan: Let’s ask our neighbors in the community to join us and again and again! Berkshire in sponsoring meals for school families United Way heard what we were in need, and let's partner with a local doing and asked us to apply for a restaurant called The Marketplace grant to ensure those meals would and with the school’s food service keep being delivered for 10 full department for safe production and weeks. We received $15,000 to delivery of those meals. keep the program going with the
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understanding that if we had enough community sponsors for school meals, we could use grant money to expand our reach and buy meals for seniors, prepared by John Andrews Restaurant. We always had enough community sponsors! In the meantime, other individuals from both next door and from literally around the world heard what we were doing and sent in financial contributions. This money raised would be all we had to fund the project after the grant money ran out. When the grant ran out, we looked at the fund and to our amazement we had $17,000 in the bank. More than we had when we first received the grant! We were ready to fund another ten weeks.
Now we have ended that second ten weeks. In these twenty weeks, our community has called into The Marketplace to sponsor 1,195 school meals, (a gift of over $32,000) each of which contained four servings of delicious and nutritious food. In addition to those incredible sponsorships, we’ve used over $27,000 in grant money and contributions over the last twenty weeks.
