CCDBR food bank to help serve needy in rural areas

A pilot food pantry program launched by Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Baton Rouge will provide food to underserved residents in the rural areas of the diocese as well as offering the same service in the Baton Rouge area.

Rural Outreach, which will debut Sept. 28 at St. Margaret Queen of Scotland Church in Albany, will offer food, books and other goods to the needy in rural parishes, where the need is greatest. By early 2023, CCDBR officials are hoping the program will expand to each of the diocese’s five deaneries. 

“We are starting with the deaneries but our real focus is the far reaches in the diocese where there is not a food pantry already,” said CCDBR project coordinator Crystal McGinnis. 

“We are starting out slow because we want to get all of the kinks worked out,” said CCDBR Director of Grants Carol Spruell. 

The main food pantry, located at CCDBR, opened its doors for Baton Rouge residents Sept. 20, providing 10-pound boxes of food for every person in the household, which is the program’s protocol. The food, which is coming from the Baton Rouge Food Bank, is highly nutritional and non-perishable.

Families must register and be approved by the United States Department of Agriculture to be eligible for the program. McGinnis registration began several weeks ago for the Baton Rouge pickup and within two days the agency had received 50 calls. 

Families in the Baton Rouge area will be able to walk in, fill out an application and provide the appropriate documentation, including a copy of a recent utility bill with an address and a driver’s license. Food will be provided on-site as CCDBR becomes a designated food pantry and  everything is stored in trailers and classrooms.

Plans are to develop mobile distribution sites in the outlying areas at area churches. St. Margaret is being used as a pilot site because of its successful distribution of water and other supplies in the days and weeks following Hurricane Ida.

McGinnis said each parish will be responsible for registration to determine the number of families to be served.

Once registration is completed, the Baton Rouge Food Bank will fill the order, and CCDBR staff truck will pick up the pallets of food and bring the order back to CCDBR.

Volunteers will break down the pallets and fill each box with similar assortments of the food. 

“We can’t really determine what we get but we can make requests,” McGinnis said. “(The food bank) will do its best to fulfill that request.”

Unique to the rural areas, books and other goods, such as cleaning supplies, will also be distributed.

“We are focusing on the rural areas because that is where the food deserts are,” Spruell said. “It’s a living witness from the churches that they get involved, and it’s part of their mission and ours too.”

Spruell said CCDBR will initially work with Catholic churches, adding that a survey earlier in the spring revealed food was one of the top priorities among the rural churches. Eventually, the program will likely expand to other denominations, she said.  

Spruell said the program is being funded by a $50,000 Second Share grant and a $15,000 grant from the Capital Area United Way. Offering books to the rural areas is also part of the Second Share grant.
“Food is something we’ve never really done before,” Spruell said. “We’ve done some distribution sites after disasters but on this kind of scale, making an impact over a longer amount of time for each family, is a huge milestone for the agency, particularly the parish operations in rural areas.”

For more information on the food pantry or to volunteer to help break down pallets and organize individual food boxes, visit ccdiobr.org.