Helpers: December 11, 2020
David Coffin picks up food donations for St. Katharine Drexel Food Pantry. Photo: Andrea Knox
Last summer, Stephanie McDonough of Wallingford posted on the Nether-Swarthmore TimeBank website that the St. Katharine Drexel Food Pantry in Chester needed contributions. Andrea Knox, a member of Swarthmore Friends Meeting, saw the post. “I figured members of the Meeting would welcome this opportunity to fight the pandemic in a constructive way,” she says.
So Knox began soliciting contributions for this food pantry in the Meeting’s weekly email newsletter. She reports, “We’ve sent food to the pantry almost every week since.”
Donors collect bags of non-perishable items, and volunteers David Coffin and Donna Milligan deliver them to St. Katharine Drexel. Knox estimates that they’ve sent more than a hundred bags of groceries to the pantry in the last six months, including canned fruit and vegetables, canned chili and tuna, breakfast cereal, pancake mix and syrup, baby food, pasta and sauce, rice and beans, peanut butter and jelly, instant mashed potatoes, and cake mix.
“For Thanksgiving, we sent frozen turkeys,” Knox says. “We’ll do the same for Christmas.”
Coffin, who worked for decades in the wholesale-produce business, also picks up donations for St. Katharine Drexel from the Giant supermarket in Aston, and is a regular volunteer with MANNA in Philadelphia, delivering meals to those in need.
Milligan has been a volunteer and board member at St. Katharine Drexel for several years. She notes that their food pantry, which operates out of Immaculate Heart of Mary, a historically Black Catholic church, was founded more than 50 years ago, when a nun and some parishioners saw a need and started distributing food from the parish house’s back porch.
“It’s the sort of place where you get way more out of volunteering than you give,” she says.
To fill holiday dinner baskets, the St. Katharine Drexel Food Pantry requests donations of boxed mashed potatoes; dry stuffing; cake mix, turkey or chicken gravy or broth (instant or in jars); and canned goods, particularly green beans, yams, corn, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin. Mail or hand-deliver your checks or food donations to Donna Milligan, 720 Ogden Ave., Swarthmore PA 19081. Make checks payable to “St. Katharine Drexel Food Pantry.” Leave donations in or near the large bins (labeled “St. Katharine Drexel”) near Milligan’s garage.
