May 2026  HOPE & JOY FOOD PANTRY Hope & Joy Food Pantry Newsletter This year we've helped 5,449 people! It’s finally better weather, and we have been as busy as the bees! By the Numbers: This year, our food pantry:
Operational Updates: Our director was recently featured on 716 Together, a radio show on WHTT that highlights social, economic, and health issues that affect our community. Give a listen here if you'd like to learn more about our pantry, how we try to best serve our community, and what makes us different from other pantries! Great job, Kim!!! One of the food pantries near us, Evangel Food Pantry, officially closed on 4/29. They have been redirecting their clients to other pantries, including ours. We’ve had a small influx in clients due to this. We are happy to take them on though, and support our neighbors in need! Fundraisers: Last Saturday we held our Drag Bingo Fundraiser! We had a great turnout and brought in $849.63! THANK YOU to everyone who supported us as we tried a new type of fundraiser! The performers messaged us afterwards and said they had a blast and would love to do something again in the future! Save the date: Saturday, July 25th at 6pm will be our next fundraiser! We will be hosting our 2nd annual “A Night in the Garden”. Sit under the fairy lights in our beautiful community garden, now featuring a variety of heirloom vegetables! Enjoy mixed drinks (mocktails available) and some homemade hors d’oeuvres. Pre-sale tickets are on sale now for $20, otherwise it’s $25 at the door. Reserve your spot here! Community Garden A couple weeks ago, we had a group of volunteers from the Mount Mercy Academy come in and they worked hard in the rain! They painted and wrapped our pallets (stay tuned to see what we do with them!) and shoveled fresh soil onto our garden beds. We appreciate all your hard work! Way to go, girls! We got soil from Leo Brennan Topsoil and gravel from Gravel Monkey delivered over the last couple weeks, and we are working on putting it in place! We also got lumber at a huge discount from the Home Depot on Transit Rd this weekend - we are so appreciative of them! This will be the building blocks for our new fence to help keep critters out of the garden. This Wednesday, we will be transplanting over 300 seeds from the greenhouse into the garden beds. If you’re able to help, please join us between 12-5pm on Wednesday 5/20! We will provide gloves and gardening tools. We are always looking for regular garden help. If you are able to donate any extra tools, we are looking for: gloves, trowels, shovels, nails, tomato cages, gardening wire, paint brushes, shears, sprayers, stakes, fertilizer, and garden hoses. If you are a gardener or have an interest in learning, we would love to have more garden volunteers this summer! Please reach out! Donations & Giving: Thank you to Sue Flemming for donating garden tools, drinks for volunteers, and tomato plants for the garden! She also donated food and prizes for our Drag Bingo fundraiser and was a HUGE help! We would also like to give a huge shoutout to Joy Tedeschi for donating her half of the 50/50 Drag Bingo raffle winnings back to the pantry! Thank you for your amazing generosity, Joy! Hannah Pepin from Hi-Way Garden Center donated a BUNCH of flowers to our garden! This will not only help beautify the garden, but will help pollinate our heirloom vegetables! If you'd like to spread the word about our pantry, we have a donation box with brochures available outside our entrance. You can also share our Facebook or website links down below. Your gifts—big or small—help us feed our neighbors year-round. Thank you to all our individual donors this month: Kim Wilson, Nicholas Tobiczyk, Shawn Milligan, Jacob Rutowski, Jennifer Parrack, Pamela Netzel, Beverly Kemp, and several anonymous donors. Grants: We applied to the Community Ministries grant opportunity per Pastor Ruth’s recommendation. Thank you for referring us! If you know of any funding opportunities we can apply for, please let us know! Looking Ahead: We attended UB’s Open House for Community and Civic Engagement on 5/5. We saw projects from dozens of students about how they are helping their community. This group is also the group that sends us UB volunteers each semester, so we were excited to see their projects! We look forward to our continued partnership and helping our communities together! United Way has approved a volunteer project for our pantry! They have scheduled their “Day of Caring” with us on June 17th. We are looking forward to having them! We are considering teaching some classes this summer, such as: how to grow salads in a patio pot, how to save seeds, and companion planting: how to utilize your space. If these or similar subjects are of interest to you or people you know, please let us know! We are looking to gauge interest and get feedback on what classes could be useful to our community! Thank you for helping us bring hope and joy to every table. Together, we make our community stronger. Other ways to support us:  Volunteer with us Sundays 12-3pm Mondays 4-7pm Wednesdays 10am-5pm Volunteer duties typically include picking and packing grocery orders, bringing groceries out to client's cars when they arrive for their appointments, and re-stocking the shelves with food. Community Garden In summer, we grow a community garden and need help maintaining it: de-weeding, watering, and general clean-up of the beds.  Upcoming Events
Hope & Joy Food Pantry |
