Our church is going through changes. The first is that we are adapting to being in the middle of a pandemic, and next, we are going through a transition period of welcoming a new priest. Our new priest supports our Episcopal Church Women ministry and urges our Bishop’s Committee along with our ECW to continue to look beyond our church walls to serve our community in its needs. Our ECW ministry consists of a small group of dedicated, caring women who do exactly that!
Through researching our justice ministry, we learned from our county that hunger topped its list of needs. Even before the pandemic, one out of four children and one out of seven adults go to bed hungry in Pinellas County. Since the pandemic, food insecurity has begun to affect families who never experienced hunger before. Hunger and food insecurity remains a top priority in our community.
We decided that this was an issue that we needed to address.
But how could a small group of women and a family-sized church reach and successfully and continuously serve this need of food insecurity to a community at large?
By coincidence, the son of our recording secretary of our Bishop’s Committee and president of our ECW recently took a job with a non-profit organization called Feeding Tampa Bay. She told us that the Feeding Tampa Bay organization provides and distributes bags of food free to those in need. We had a contact!
We presented our proposal to partner with Feeding Tampa Bay to our new priest, and she was excited and eager to participate and support our endeavor.
Our ECW president contacted her son, and immediately he set up a distribution station at our church. Feeding Tampa Bay would supply the food, and we, along with their volunteers, would package and distribute the food, in addition to managing traffic. Imagine—all this was free of charge to our church and community! All we had to do was supply the space and volunteer workers.
Our church property has wide driveways on either side, allowing for easy entry and departure, along with lots of parking spaces. Feeding Tampa Bay arrives every third Thursday with their tractor trailer truck filled with fresh fruit and vegetables, bread, milk, a type of protein, etc., for distribution to our community. We gather with their volunteers and package all the food into bags. Our clients drive through, and we place the bags of food, according to size of family, in the trunk of their cars. By partnering with Feeding Tampa Bay every month, our church with our ECW distributes between 6,000 to 9,000 pounds of fresh food to those in need. We are becoming known in the community as a church that helps those in need.
Our ECW is a staunch supporter of the program. We are keeping our ECW strong by trying to support all programs that our priest and other members of Good Samaritan may devise. By working together to feed and serve our community, we are seeking to live up to our name as being Good Samaritans. Go ECW!
The Church of the Good Samaritan ECW Clearwater, Florida