Amen To Action: Volunteers pack food toward goal of providing 1 million meals
Reaching a goal of packing 100,000 meals in one morning is a logistical marvel to behold.
More than 220 volunteers of a wide age range gathered Nov. 20 at St. Joan of Arc Church in South Park Township to do their part in support of Amen To Action, a program founded with the intention of providing 1 million meals to people in the Pittsburgh area.
Wearing protective gloves and hair nets, the volunteers worked methodically throughout the morning filling plastic bags with ingredients to make fortified oatmeal. In turn, the bags were placed inside large boxes and transported to be stacked on a series of pallets, where they were sealed together to prepare for shipping.
Proudly taking part in the proceedings was the Rev. Daniel Maurer, pastor of the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh’s St. Catherine Labouré Parish, which was formed last year by the merger of St. Joan of Arc and St. Louise de Marillac in Upper St. Clair.
“Actually, we had more than half the people sign up before we even put it out to our parish,” he said about the Amen To Action event. “People from other churches and different faiths were jumping on board, so that’s one of the really beautiful things about this. We’re just the host parish, and I’m happy to be able to do that.”
Amen To Action developed from a series of meetings by Pittsburgh religious leaders, including Bishop David Zubik, who were striving for unity. The first food-packing session took place the day after Thanksgiving in 2017 at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, with 3,000-plus volunteers assembling 1 million meals for distribution by the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank.
“This year, because of the pandemic, we’ve changed it, and they’re in 10 different churches of all denominations,” said Cindy Deschaine of Economy Borough, representing Amen To Action at St. Joan of Arc, about the volunteers. “You have some pretty young kids here working and packing. It doesn’t matter the age. You can pack a meal.”
Ensuring the morning’s processes flowed smoothly was Leon Sporrer, event coordinator for Meals of Hope, a Naples, Fla.-based nonprofit that focuses on food packing and keeping meals in local communities.
“Amen To Action is a really good organization. They do a lot in the Pittsburgh area,” Sporrer said. “It’s a lot of work behind the scenes.”
Just ask Kathy Drummond, a Bethel Park resident who helped organize the St. Catherine Labouré effort with her husband, Jim
“This was our first time with this, and we had things what we thought were under control,” she said.
That included delivery of nine pallets of food and supplies, which ended up arriving the day before the event, unloaded at the church’s upper level.
Oops.
“These are 50-pound bags of oats, 50-pound bags of sugar, 50-plus bags of you-name-it and every piece of equipment here. And it all had to be brought downstairs. We didn’t have that in our plan,” Kathy said. “So Jim was calling the golf league, and we’re calling the CCD kids. We’re calling the Boy Scouts. We called Bethel Park High School. You name it. If we thought of it, we called.”
And a significant number of people reported for unanticipated duty.
“We started at 1:30,” Kathy said. “By 5:30, we had all of this product brought downstairs, everything set up, and we were done.”
Amen to that.
For more information, visit amentoaction.org.