Putting a Dent in Food Insecurity
The number of people in our community facing food insecurity continues to grow. This need is especially acute during the holiday season.
On November 14, nearly 20 volunteers gathered at the NCJW/Essex offices for a Mitzvah-in-a-Minute Fall Food Drive. The goal: packaging shelf-stable lunches for Christine’s Kitchen in West Orange and assembling holiday food bags for our Center for Women clients.
Christine’s Kitchen is a “soup kitchen” operated by Holy Trinity Church in West Orange that provides more than 200 takeaway lunches each week for its clients. Our volunteers donated, packed and delivered a week’s worth of lunch bags filled with shelf-stable food like peanut butter, granola bars, applesauce, saltine crackers and more!
“The feeling of giving back to the community is wonderful,” NCJW/Essex member and volunteer Ilene Stern shared. “Whatever you do, a little something goes a long way.”
Thanks in large part to our friends at Nukk-Freeman & Cerra, P.C., volunteers also assembled bags filled with Thanksgiving fare – stuffing, gravy, canned corn and green beans, cornbread mix – ready for our Center for Women clients. As CFW Director Patty Kremen told the group, “This will go a long way to helping our clients at Thanksgiving, and they can direct the money they would have spent on food to other necessities.”
Thank you to Janet Berger who chaired this MIM, Mitzvah-in-a-Minute Chair Penina Barr, VP of Volunteers Cindy Charney and all who donated and participated.
