St. Vincent de Paul Food Pantry

We the volunteers of Our Lady of the Greenwood Food Pantry are truly blessed in carrying out our mission of feeding the poor and carrying out our duty to carry out the Christian mission as found in the Beatitudes and the enormous support we receive from our pastor, parish council and members of our parish.

This support means we are able to provide food to hundreds of families per month.  To meet the needs we are open for food distribution five days per week.  We dispatch two to three trucks weekly to Gleaners Food Bank along with six trips monthly to Midwest Food Bank.  We also make numerous trips to shop for items not available from the food banks and trips to the cardboard recycling bin.

Most volunteers select a day of the week to staff the pantry which is open 3 hours per day except Wednesday when it is two hours.  Other volunteers donate their time and trucks by going to the food banks while others do maintenance cleaning or help unload large shipments.

Five times this year we hosted Gleaners Mobile Food Pantry.  We invite the general parish to participate.  We have up to 300 families come asking for food.  We keep the 30 volunteers busy unloading the truck of food and then staying for two hours to distribute food.  We have been truly blessed with weather conditions and sufficient volunteers being available.

Our Lady of the Greenwood parishioners are very generous funding the parish St Vincent de Paul Society where our monetary funding originates.  Those parishioners who donate food or respond to our special requests provide an enormous boost to pantry operations.