Our Daily Bread Thanks Mansfield Community

Recently, Mansfield’s Our Daily Bread Food Pantry has been the beneficiary of the efforts of several community organizations.

Our Saturday morning distribution now goes more quickly
(which both volunteers and clients love!) thanks to the expertise of some Covidien employees. While working at the pantry last fall,  several employees from the quality and processes improvement group noticed there were opportunities to  improve the pantry’s  physical work flow. Working closely with pantry volunteers Eric Greenberg and Matt King,  they came up with a plan and a  few weeks later, the Covidien employees were back, revamping our shelving system to utilize the space more efficiently.

This spring, several companies – Invensys, the Sharon Credit
Union, the Holiday Inn and Barrows Insurance, along with members of the
Mansfield and Foxboro Rotary Clubs – again pitched in to help clean and spruce
up the pantry. Shelves were emptied, then cleaned and covered in fresh contact
paper. Our freezers and refrigerators were cleaned, and in the storage area,
all the food was removed,  then the area was swept and vacuumed.

The help of these businesses and organizations was tremendous. Each Saturday morning, more than a hundred households ‘shop’ at the pantry – requiring a large amount of food inventory. While the pantry’s regular volunteers are awesome, their focus is on the weekly shopping and re-stocking.  Having many sets of willing hands doing major cleaning and organizing  of our inventory
keeps the pantry looking good and functioning smoothly. Bravo to all who
helped!

Finally, thank you to Mansfield’s hard working letter carriers who picked up and delivered more than 1900 pounds of food to the pantry as part of the US Postal Service’s Stamp Out Hunger program. Again, volunteers worked Saturday afternoon to quickly unload, sort and shelve all the donations from Mansfield residents.

During the past 15 years that Our Daily Bread has been in operation, thousands of people have been helped. But we couldn’t do it without the all the individuals, businesses and community organizations who give of their time and offer food and cash donations. We thank all of you. 

If you would like to donate to Our Daily Bread, monetary donations can be sent to 15 West Street.
Food donations can be dropped off at the pantry on Saturday afternoons between
3 and 4 p.m. or at any one of the drop boxes located around town. For more
information, go to www.mansfieldfoodpantry.org.

From Our Daily Bread Steering Committee: Chithra Baylis,
Nancy Beaton, Deb Chambers, Julie Cline, Kristine Copley, Dan Conrad, Kathleen
Deely, Barbara Emmerth, Eric Greenberg, Kim Hoy, Lucy Kelliher, Dick Kelsay,
Nikki Sawayer, Maria Smith and Linda Sohn.