Packing at Blessings of Hope

“Let’s go volunteer at Blessings of Hope!” My sister Brenda is the family planner (on the left in the above photo) and that’s how 19 family members, mostly children, ended up bagging flour together on a Wednesday afternoon earlier this summer. It was great thing to do together as a family, and a fun way to support a local ministry doing an astonishing work.

Blessings of Hope has been in my neighborhood for several years, and for a long time I thought it was a food pantry. Blessings of Hope, I now know, is not a food pantry or soup kitchen. It’s a wholesale food bank for food pantries and soup kitchens. Blessings of Hope accepts truckloads of donated food and re-packages it into manageable portions for needy families.

Volunteers do the repackaging. Some volunteers, like my teenage niece and nephew help regularly. Others go whenever they have time.

The first time I helped at Blessings of Hope was with a church group. We spent the evening bagging toasted coconut marshmallows that were donated by Dutch Valley Bulk Foods. The toasted coconut marshmallows were in giant bulk bags, and we put them into bags about the size of bread bags. It was a sticky situation.

When our family went, we were bagging flour, not marshmallows, so it was dusty and not sticky. We were in a small room with tables, bags, labels, scoops, and tubs to keep things organized.

In the corner of the room there was a skid with fifty-pound bags of donated flour. “Look,” I said. “All the bags have tape on them. That’s why they were donated.”

Our table started with bagging cake flour. I was helping my sister Joanne and some of her children. Joanne supervised the bagging while I twisted on twist ties and helped one of the nephews put labels on. Any amount on flour on the labels ruined their ability to stick.

Having the children help slowed things down, of course, and some flour got spilled. But everyone was enjoying themselves.

Two of the nephews helped Mom bag cornmeal. The boys begin to whistle, so Mom decided to whistle too. The children was amazed. “Grandma, I didn’t know you can whistle!” and “You whistle real good!”

When one fifty-pound bag was done, we got another one. There was all kinds of flour—whole wheat, occident flour, cake flour, and rye flour. One table bagged fifty pounds of sunflower seeds.

After we bagged the flour, we stacked the small bags into crates. From Blessings of Hope, the repackaged food is taken to other towns and cities, including Philadelphia and New York City. It goes to support homeless shelters like the Bowery Mission. Some churches come to pick up food boxes for needy families. Food is also given directly to the homeless in Philadelphia.

When we were finished, each family was offered some food to take home. We took home some vegetables, baked goods, and eggs. Most of the food is past the sell-by date.

At first, this aspect of volunteering at Blessings of Hope confused me. Why would the volunteers be allowed to take food home themselves? Then I learned that Blessings of Hope gets food that’s otherwise intended for the landfill. They accept tractor-trailer loads of food from huge corporations that smaller food banks don’t have the space for. No donor’s money pays for food.

According to the staff we talked with, Blessings of Hope was started by a man named Aaron Fisher. His father died when he was a child, and his widowed mother didn’t always have enough money to feed her family. As a child, Aaron vowed that he would help feed the hungry when he grew up. Today, Blessings of Hope has distributed more $70 million’s worth of food that would have otherwise been sent to the landfill. You can read more here.

So if you are looking for a family-friendly place to volunteer in Lancaster County, PA, try Blessings of Hope!