Food pantry receives $22,000 grant for walk-in freezer

From Buffalo

The Bread of Life Food Pantry is getting more space – freezer space, that is.

A recently-received grant for more than $22,000 from the Episcopal Diocese provided the food pantry with the necessary funding to purchase a walk-in freezer.

The new freezer will replace the 11 “household type, chest freezers,” that the pantry has been using, said Pam McFadden, a food pantry board member.

“Many were old and they didn’t always work as well as a commercial one,” she said.

The household freezers also did not provide enough storage space for meat. In fact, for the past five years, McFadden said the pantry has had to turn away donated meat due to insufficient storage space.

“Plenty of meat was offered to us,” she said. “There was not enough capacity for it.”

Because they have not had the space to store meat, McFadden said the Food Pantry runs out each year around July.

Her husband, Johnnie Pond, chairman of the Bread of Life Food Pantry board, initiated the plan to get a new freezer.

“He said, ‘what we need to do is put a project together to get a new freezer,’” McFadden said of Pond. “I think primarily just because he was convinced it could be done, it went forward.”

More here-

http://www.buffalobulletin.com/articles/2010/07/21/elsewhere_in_the_bulletin/doc4c472d0049afa050021893.txt