Portsmouth Food Bank opens for families in need
Located at St. Barnabas Church’s Parish Hall
PORTSMOUTH — Set up quickly to fill a need brought on by the COVID-19 (coronavirus) crisis, the Portsmouth Food Bank started collecting donations last week and began distributing bags full of groceries to families on Tuesday of this week.
The food bank was initiated by the town but is located in the parish center (lower parking lot) at St. Barnabas Church.
“St. Barnabas has graciously offered their facility to be a staging point for a food bank that’s strictly for people impacted by COVID-19,” said Rich Talipsky, the town’s director of business development who’s also a volunteer at the food bank. “We’ve been collecting food for about the past week.”
Organizers expect the food bank to operate for the duration of the COVID-19 emergency and to shut down as soon as the crisis is over, Mr. Talipsky said.
“Of course, we don’t know when that’s going to be. We’re planning for the best, but looking at the long haul as well,” he said.
Ken Garthee, a parishioner at St. Barnabas, is coordinating the effort, as he’s done for the church’s Giving Hope and Health Ministry.
“We brought it from our pantry into the hall,” Mr. Garthee said Monday, and pointed to 75 grocery bags full of food that were lining the floor inside the parish center. “We have 75 families ready to be given (bags). People just drive up and we’ll hand them out. We received donations every day last week and today. We’ve already had four families that we’ve helped so far.”
Donations have been “effective and steady and we’ve had good help come in and help sort and bag. We have volunteers but we could always use more. They should call the office.” (See related story.)
All donations should be non-perishable, unexpired food items. “We check the dates. We don’t give away anything that’s (expired). Anything older than that we throw away, or we’ll give to Florence Gray, and they decide if they want to keep it,” Mr. Garthee said.
When asked if there were any particular items the food bank could use, he said juice and grocery gift cards. (Stop & Shop gift cards can also be used for purchasing gasoline, he pointed out.)
‘We’re very lucky’
The Rev. Peter J. Andrews said he was impressed by the volunteer effort, and the project was certainly needed.
“The folks here at St. Barnabas, because they do so much with the regular food pantry, they really are the experts that can run it because they have a vast experience doing this,” he said. “We don’t know what the crowd will be, and we don’t know how many people will be coming, but we hope to help as many people in Portsmouth as we can. Obviously the more families that need help, the more donations we will need, so we’ll be back and forth with reports to let people in town know.”
Mr. Garthee agreed.
“We have such a generous parish; they’ll give us anything,” he said. “Now that it’s been opened up to the entire town of Portsmouth, they’re giving us even more. We’re very lucky.”
