It’s the first Thursday of the month, otherwise known as Care and Share day, for me. I manage the Food Bank here in the Emerald City. I didn’t really aspire to that position or have it on my todo list for retirement but life has a way of recruiting us to the work that needs doing. This spring, a friend of mine was managing the program through the United Methodist Church and asked if I would assist her.
“You know, kind of fill in, if I can’t be here or something,” she said.
I agreed and J started providing as much information as she could about the program but she had only just taken over herself, so the truth was, we were both flying blind. I attempted to learn how it all worked but never really sat down and looked at all of the paper work, thinking someone far, far away dealt with all that and we just gave food to the folks in our community who needed it.
One day while I was out working in the garden, J came through the gate and asked if I had a minute for a chat. We sat down in the shade and she informed me, she was off to Wyoming to take a new position and would be leaving in the next month or so.
“Hmm,” I said.
“So, you’ll step in and run the Food Bank program. Right?”
The first thought was, crap, am I a sucker, or what? Then I started scheming on how I was going to worm my way out of this predicament. I didn’t say anything for awhile, just let the silence hang there, in the shade of the big Cedar tree. J, loves words though and immediately began filling the silence with all of the reasons why I needed to step up and how important feeding people in the community was and I was obviously the best person for the job. When she walked back out of the gate a half hour or so later, I was the new manager of the Food Bank in the Emerald City.
After completing a 4 hour, online Food Handler Safety Course plus a certification test and studying the required Civil Rights training, before giving the short course to the other volunteers. I started thinking that this was almost as bad as the job I left in Big Oil, where I had to constantly be certified or re-certified for dozens of obscure training sets on safety requirements, diversity and government regulations.
Partnering with Care and Share we distribute food via two government programs; The Commodity Supplemental Food Program (CSFP) and The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP). Right on cue, when I took over managing the programs, all of the client certifications and applications began to expire, so I had to re-certify dozens of them each month. Forms, forms and more forms. Governmental requirements, eligibility requirements, financial requirements, scans, pdf’s, spreadsheets and reports. I had to start actually checking my email, I hadn’t worried about email for years. So I was a bit overwhelmed and feeling a little like a sucker, early on. I even had thoughts of how I could work J’s magic on someone else, talk them into taking over the program, so I could get back to fishing, hiking, biking and other retirement adventures.
It’s a half year later now and while I don’t necessarily look forward to the first Thursday of the month, I have a system and everything including paper work, get’s done in a single day and I don’t feel like a sucker anymore. I actually embrace the mission and feel pretty good about what we have accomplished together here in the Emerald City. We have a completely volunteer, zero cost program, that provides healthy, high quality, food for hundreds of seniors and dozens of kids. Volunteers from Emerald City and the far reaches of Cheyenne County meet up on the first Thursday of the month to unselfishly offer their time and energy to help feed our neighbors.
It has varied some since the COVID-19 outbreak, with a few food shortages early on but most months we move thousands of pounds of food around. Packaging it into neat parcels that we deliver right to our clients vehicle. We switched to curbside pickup when COVID-19 lockdowns were in full swing this spring and it works beautifully. No one even needs to get out of their car.
The volunteers that make the program work have all been plugged into it much longer than I have. I’m the new kid on the block and it is an honor to work with them. There is something special about sharing an act of service with a group of folks. It just feels right. No one judges anyone else. Everyone has different capabilities and offers up what they have – Free of charge, without expectations, working together, to help their neighbors. Perhaps the way we all felt around each other, a hundred or two hundred years ago. Before the industrial revolution, the technical revolution or God help us; Industrial Revolution 4.0 or whatever it is they are calling The Great Reset. I call it toxic technocracy and if we take a look at other totalitarian, collectivist regimes from recent history, it very likely means more obscene hunger than we see in the present paradigm but that is a story for another day.
None of this would be possible without the good people at Care and Share in the Springs, whose mission it is to feed communities in Southern Colorado. Here is a bit of their history and mission statement.
History
In 1972, our founder Sister Dominique Pisciotta saw many people in her own community struggling with hunger and decided to do something about it. Hunger wasn’t ok with Sister Dominique then and it isn’t ok with us now. We know you feel the same way.
In the early days, we distributed food baskets throughout Colorado Springs. Now, we provide millions of pounds of food throughout 31 Southern Colorado counties. We have far outgrown our humble beginnings, where we distributed food out of volunteers’ basements and a two car garage on S. Wahsatch Street. Today, we have the privilege of running our operation from well- equipped distribution centers in Colorado Springs and Pueblo. And volunteers, always the lifeblood of our work, have grown in ranks from one committed Sister to more than 7,000 annually!
Mission
At Care and Share Food Bank, our core purpose is to bridge the gap between hunger and abundance. Our mission is to provide food, partnering opportunities, and education to fight hunger and food insecurity in Southern Colorado communities. Our vision is a hunger-free Southern Colorado.
Speaking of Banks. I want to give a shout out to Eastern Colorado Bank, here in the Emerald City. A bank that actually serves their community, embracing the Golden Rule; “Treat folks the way you want to be treated.” This past summer, the Federal Home Loan Bank honored them with the 2020 Community Leader Award. This prestigious award was an incredible achievement for a humble small town bank on the High Plains. It included a $5000 donation to a nonprofit of their choice and they chose the Care and Share Food Bank for Southern Colorado. Thank You Eastern Colorado Bank, you guys are awesome.
Clean air, clean water and clean food; the big three. Globally, nearly 800 million people lack access to adequate food resources. About one in nine humans do not have enough to eat. I’m not talking about third world countries, folks. The Care and Share estimate right here in Southern Colorado is 1 in 8. Hunger and malnutrition affect a person’s mental ability, health, work and productivity. Hunger and malnutrition are the world’s greatest health risks, more pressing than AIDs, malaria, tuberculosis and COVID-19 combined. Let’s fix this. It begins with awareness and ends with action. There are numerous opportunities to end the obscenity of hunger in our society. Find one.
