2008 Woodie Awards
Getting mobile with food
By: Frank Eslinger
Issue date: 2/25/08 Section: News
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About 180 student and community volunteers helped distribute food to nearly 300 families during a mobile food pantry.
"This is a very humbling experience," said Rebecca Garbutt, a Livonia junior and volunteer at the pantry. "It feels like I'm helping out. It's only a little, but every little bit helps. It sounds cliché, but it's true."
The Community Compassion Network organized the pantry, providing volunteers who distributed the food. Several student volunteer groups, including the Barnes Hall Public Service Residential Community, also donated their time to the cause. The Lansing Red Cross Foodbank provided the food.
Mount Pleasant resident Susanne Wroblewski, director of the Community Compassion Network, said she helps organize at least one mobile food pantry a month.
"The Community Compassion Network is basically made of a few different local churches and student groups," she said. "Every month we get a truck full of food. This month the $1,000 needed for the truck was raised by Troutman Hall."
Wroblewski said the Community Compassion Network tries to help those in need.
"The CCN tries to provide needed items to families that need their basic needs met," she said. "We try our best to serve others with compassion. We smile. We don't judge."
She said there have been other food pantries in the past.
"It's always in a different place," Wroblewski said. "This is the 34th mobile food pantry that we've put on. We've given out half of a million pounds of food in the past three years."
Wroblewski said the pantry was successful this month, even though the turnout was smaller than expected.
"Generally we get around 300 to 350 families; this year we got a bit less than 300."
Volunteers on Saturday also were tasked with packaging food for the international food relief campaign "Kids Against Hunger." Barnes Hall Director Luanne Goffnett said half of the 10,000 packaged meals will be taken to the Dominican Republic by a local church during spring break.
"The other half will go to the local community," she said.
Goffnett recently created the Public Service Residential Community in Barnes and said the group already is active.
"Those six students helped organize the food packaging," she said.
In the end, Goffnett said she wanted to have students get involved and enjoy what they do.
"I want them to create a balance between giving and receiving," she said.
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