Our Chamber just completed our fourth Thanksgiving Meals Initiative. Through the support of our membership, lots of generous donations, and community partners that help us pull it all off – we were able to feed 66 families for Thanksgiving.
This year we were able to work with our new member, Lowes Foods, to get the Thanksgiving meals. They were eager to help with this project, and the deli manager, Bobby, expressed how much fun he had putting these meals together.
Sam’s Club came through for us as they do every year, and donated a pie for every meal we had pledged. So everyone had a pumpkin pie dessert!
We largely work with our Pitt County Schools social workers to find the families in our community who could most benefit from these meals. Kim Anderson is the lead for PCS, and she works with those that are in the Winterville schools to find the families in need.
This year, Julia’s Well – a food pantry based out of Ayden that serves the Ayden and Winterville community – said they had a lot of people that needed feeding. So, we were happy to donate the remainder of the meals to them.
Both organizations came to pick up the meals from us where they then set out into the community to deliver.
Being able to be a part of all this coming together leaves you with a lot of warmth in your heart for the holidays. We had many volunteers come and put in the sweat equity to make this happen. It takes a village to pull this off!
I hope that those reading this will remember that initiatives like these are made possible by their support through shopping local. Local businesses (and churches and organizations) support local – either through their dollars or through hard work (often both).
