NETTLETON • On Saturday, approximately 100 volunteers made preparations to provide boxes of food to 900 area families, or an estimated 1,800 people, at the Nettleton FAITH Food Pantry on Front Street.
“This takes a lot of people doing a lot of things,” said pantry coordinator Jim Long said.
Long is a retired physics teacher who started with the pantry nine years ago after working at Itawamba Community College for 33 years. Long said November always brings in the highest volume of food donations – and those in need.
“The biggest give out of the year is always going to be November, and the holidays are part of it,” Long said.
Pantry visitors are first directed to the office area where eligibility, based on income level, is determined. Those at poverty level, as outlined by the state Department of Human Services, can then receive two boxes, or a 14-day supply of food. The pantry had 60,000 pounds of food to give away on Saturday.
Pantry volunteers also direct visitors to other resources for assistance for electric bills or other financial needs.
At the pantry, there were two warehouses – one with food and one with drinks. Visitors drove from one warehouse to the other to receive two boxes packed with food and a case of soft drinks. There were 1,100 boxes of soft drinks available Saturday.
“The community comes out and supports us while we’re playing, so we like to give back to them,” said Nettleton High School senior Macy McMillan, who came with a group from the school’s basketball team.
“Our church does this twice a year for about (the past) eight or nine years,” said volunteer Sara Lauderdale, who came with several other volunteers from Brewer United Methodist Church.
“My husband comes and helps out every month. He will go to Sam’s, Kroger or Wal-Mart, they will call and say they have an order they want to donate. He’ll drive the truck and go pick it up on Fridays, which is their pickup day,” said Ashley Greer, another Brewer United Methodist member, who spent the day volunteering with her young son.
Volunteers pulled perishable food items from several walk-in coolers, unwrapped pallets full of cans and boxes piled high with food, and then filled empty boxes before pushing them down conveyor belts leading outside, where the Nettleton High School baseball team unloaded the boxes into waiting cars.
Even children and teenagers were on hand tearing down boxes and stocking boxes with food items for hungry families in area school districts. Long said the pantry will typically give out food to residents from Nettleton, Shannon, Verona, and Plantersville.
“We get calls pretty regularly from the schools saying they have families that need food and a lot of times the teachers will come pick it up for them,” Long said.
The pantry has a few unique features as well: three walk-in freezers and two refrigerators hold perishable food items.
“We think we’re the only ones in the state that have three big freezers,” Long said.
“That’s a problem that other food pantries have, is they don’t have freezers or coolers like we do,” volunteer Doug Clark added.
Nettleton FAITH Food Pantry also networks with other area food pantries. For example, excess food is regularly given to a food pantry in Fulton.
“We all share a lot of stuff together, and we can hold a lot of food so the advantage is, if somebody comes out and says they have a lot of food they want to give away, we can put it out,” Long said.
Food and drinks for the pantry are supplied by Pepsi, the Mid-South food pantry in Memphis, and Mississippi Food Network through the USDA. It also receives donations from churches and nearby communities. It will also purchase food from area retailers.
The pantry receives a 15,000 to 20,000-pound truckload of goods from the New Albany Wal-Mart each month, for example.
The pantry recently received a $35,000 donation from the E.R. Carpenter Foundation toward a new delivery truck, and after raising an additional $15,000, the newer, slightly used truck had its first retail run Friday, ahead of a hectic distribution schedule on Saturday.
“Our little truck had about had it,” Long said.
It takes approximately $75,000 per year to keep the ever-growing pantry alive and able to provide for several northeast Mississippi communities.
Volunteers raise funds yearlong. This year’s fundraisers included two fish fries in the Brewer community, and a roadblock at the four-way stop in downtown Nettleton that raised almost $2,000. The pantry also receives funding from United Way of Northeast Mississippi and from Lee and Monroe counties.
“We started out with $883 and our first give out was October of 1999, we gave out to 93 families out of a little four-room house, and now we’re giving out to 900 families on average,” said pantry treasurer Carolyn Holley, pointing to a picture of the original pantry a block away on Verona Street.
