Immanuel Baptist Church is becoming a front-facing service partner for the Emergency Food Pantry of Franklin County. When we begin taking orders for the Food Pantry, we will be the only front-facing location in West Frankfort, so this is a gap we felt it was critical for us to fill.
In order to get started, we need volunteers!
We will be accepting applications for orders on Mondays and Tuesdays. The orders placed on these days will be filled by the Food Pantry on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. We need volunteers who would be willing to go to the Food Pantry, pick up bags of food, and hand them out at IBC on those days.
Joni will take applications in the church office on Monday and Tuesday mornings. She will send any applications we receive to ROSM by noon those days, and ROSM will respond to confirm that the applications have been approved. At that time, she will contact the volunteer for the following day to let them know if there will be bags to pick up at the Food Pantry, and if so, how many (so the volunteer can plan appropriately for how much space they will need in their car).
The Food Pantry will call the morning we are collecting food boxes/bags to let us know they are ready (generally between 10-11 a.m.). At that point, they will request that we try to come within half an hour or so from the phone call. The volunteer who picks up the bags will then bring them back to church and help to hand them out to recipients.
This will be a learning process for us, so we may need to make plans to have some volunteers who are willing to come by again after the church office is closed for any recipients who cannot pick up during the work day. We will need volunteers to be flexible on the day of their service and communicative with us about how the process could work better.
We are hoping to find 8-10 volunteers who would be willing to sign up for one shift a month (1st Tuesday – 5th Tuesday and 1st Wednesday – 5th Wednesday). Please let Steve Dooley know if you are willing to help. We will get started as soon as we have enough volunteers to get going! Feel free to reach out to Steve or Pastor Emily with any questions you have and we will do our best to get answers for you!