South Burlington Food Shelf

As I found myself saying to someone recently, if our life is not about trying to make the lives of others better then I don't really know what the point of faith is, and, for that matter, what the point of our life is. The last couple years I've tried to put make my actions match up with my words, which has lead me to devote a lot of time to supporting TechDren. Lately I've been volunteering at the brand new South Burlington Food Shelf. I ended up on the board of the Food Shelf because they reached out to various faith organizations in the area and I jumped at the opportunity. Folks have been working for months to get the Food Shelf up and running for months, and we finally officially opened this last Friday. Yesterday was the first day that I was able to volunteer, and I'm hoping to show up and help once or twice a week from now on. It's so difficult to comprehend how a country of our almost inestimable wealth could include hunger among our many problems; one our of eight Vermonters face food insecurity, and it's one out of six for children in Vermont. Yesterday I was helping an elderly woman load a few bags full of food into her trunk yesterday and she, full of sincere gratitude, said she didn't expect the Food Shelf to be "so grand." I only cried a little. As I'm fond of opining, if we do nothing more than leave our little corner of the world better than we found it we've lead a very rich life.

We're located at 356 Dorset Street, which is close to the University Mall and right on the bus line.

And we're easy to find because of our beautiful new mural.

Here's Pedro (it's actually Peter, but the nickname has stuck) walking everybody through the training session for volunteers.

Our line of brand new donated refrigerators, which will hopefully soon be full of meat and dairy. Now we only plug a new one in when enough food shows up.

Here's our box at Aiken Hall. We're going to have something similar at the mosque once we move to the new space. Once the canned goods arrive at Aiken or the ISVT I'll make sure they get delivered to the Food Shelf. I've also been tagged to run the Twitter feed for the SBFS (to the surprise of no one).

Before yesterday's opening some of the volunteers were loading fresh vegetables.

There are all sorts of jobs for volunteers, including checking folks in. Even if you're not from South Burlington you'll get sent away with a bag of food. 

Here are some of the shelves, and one of our jobs as volunteers is to figure how what folks can take from each area - and also to keep the shelves stocked.

We have plenty of fresh vegetables, and least yesterday you could take as much as you wanted.

Right now we're open three days a week: Thursday 6:00-8:00 p.m.; Fridays 8:00-10:00 a.m.; Saturdays 8:00-10:00 a.m.