middletowneye

Amazing Grace Food Pantry Opens New Location with the Help of Wesleyan Students

The week of November 1 marked the opening of the new location of Amazing Grace Food Pantry at 16 Stack Street in the North End. For the past two months, employees and volunteers from Amazing Grace worked diligently in preparation for the move.

Amazing Grace Food Pantry began as a collaboration of several agencies, including the Red Cross, the United Way, the Salvation Army, and St. Vincent DePaul Place (located at 617 Main Street). Over time, primary responsibility for the program shifted to St. Vincent DePaul. For the past several years, St. Vincent DePaul has run Amazing Grace on its own as one of several community outreach programs. In 2009, Amazing Grace and the Soup Kitchen (also run by St. Vincent DePaul) served over 300,000 meals to the Middletown community.

Amazing Grace was located on the Main Street Extension, leasing 2,000 square feet of space, for several years. A bequest to St. Vincent DePaul Place, however, allowed for the purchase of the new location on Stack Street.

The move itself took a substantial amount of work. Ron Krom, Executive Director of St. Vincent DePaul Place, estimates that the move took “hundreds, possibly thousands” of volunteer hours over the past two months. Among these volunteers was a steady stream of students from Wesleyan University, organized by Haley Baron ‘12, the coordinator of the Housing and Hunger program run through the Office of Community Service at Wesleyan.

“I attended the Middlesex Anti-Hunger Task Force meeting [in September],” Baron said. “Ron Krom spoke, and said that he really needed people to help with the move.”

The following week, Baron began to organize students from Wesleyan University to make trips to Amazing Grace. Several days each week throughout October, small groups of students traveled to the new location on Stack Street. While some of the students were undergraduates who had previously participated in events with the Housing and Hunger program, others were newcomers; Baron was thrilled at the overall enthusiastic response from the students.

“Overall, I’d say around 50 people participated [from Wesleyan],” Baron said. “We had students who went over fall break, and families who went with their kids over parents weekend.”

Students participated in many odd jobs to help with renovations of the Stack Street location: painting, breaking down walls, moving materials, and helping with general cleaning of the construction site. The weekend of October 30, students assisted Amazing Grace with the actual move; Baron and her volunteers coordinated the use of a truck from the Middlesex County Habitat for Humanity Restore.

“There were Wesleyan students helping from beginning to end,” Krom said. “They were the first group of volunteers in the new pantry, down to the last groups that came and helped with the move on October 30.”

Wesleyan’s relationship with Amazing Grace Food Pantry goes back several years. In addition to interim volunteers, such as those who helped with the move, each year Wesleyan employs two work-study students to assist Amazing Grace with client outreach services. Fresh produce is also delivered to Amazing Grace during the growing season from Wesleyan’s student-run Long Lane farm.

By far the biggest contribution to Amazing Grace Food Pantry from Wesleyan is financial support provided by Wesleyan’s annual Fast-a-Thon. Each September, students have the option to donate a day’s worth meals from their meal plan. The cost of these meals is donated to Amazing Grace. The money raised from this event is used to purchase food from the Wesleyan suppliers. In the past two years, an excess of $15,000 has been raised from each event.

For more information about Amazing Grace Food Pantry or St. Vincent DePaul Place, please contact Pantry Coordinator Kathleen Kelly, at (860) 347-3222.

For more information about Wesleyan’s Housing and Hunger program, please contact the Office of Community Service at (860) 685-2851, or Haley Baron ’12 at house.hunger@wesleyan.edu.