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M&M Food Center closing

11/17/2017

By Tom Marshall
Senior Advocate writer

After 35 years of quietly helping families feed themselves through troubling times, the M (Mt. Sterling) and M (Montgomery County) Crisis Food Center will be closing at the end of the year.

George Atkins, chairman of the M&M board of directors, sent a letter to supporters in May explaining the decision to close.

“While the pantry’s core concept of crisis food assistance remains well supported by the community, our board and volunteer base seem to have lost their vitality in recent years,” Atkins wrote. “With the emergence of the Sterling Community Food Coalition, the board decided to stand aside and free our donor base to fully support the new pantry.

“We believe that the Sterling Community Food Coalition is well positioned to address the needs of the hungry in Montgomery County,” he added.

Since 1982, M& M served as a first responder to the crisis food needs of residents in the community.

The pantry was created to pool resources among local churches and was operated solely with volunteers. It has received support from the United Way. Several churches still operate their own food pantries, however.
“We really aren’t a food pantry,” Barbara Fanning, who has been with the organization since its beginning, said in a release. “We’re here to fill in the gaps when bad things happen.”

Those bad things can include illness, job loss or addition of a family member that mean’s there isn’t enough money to provide the basics, which can mean little or no food, a release said.

The pantry operated under a system in which the person in need called a number, a volunteer took their request and then later is met by an individual with a box of food at a public location. The food box is designed to last four or five days for the number of people in the household, the release said.

In its long history, the pantry has responded to more than 16,000 requests for crisis food assistance, with half of those occurring since 2010, Atkins said.

Each year about 42 percent of those individuals served were children and about 15 percent were seniors, he added.

Atkins noted that over the past two years, 18 percent of the households with children served by the pantry were headed by the children’s grandparents.

Statistics also show that the center has been operating as it was intended—as a temporary source of food assistance, Atkins said.
He said 49 percent of those who have utilized the center have done so only once, compared to 4 percent who used it five or more times last year.

Atkins said times have changed and resources like M&M must pass the baton.

“We’re from the last century,” Atkins said in a release. “Our concepts aren’t going to change and we’ve been around long enough to know that things do and sometimes need to change. We’d always said we didn’t want to leave the community without a general food service. We’ve seen a lot of them come and go, but feel good that the new pantry (Sterling Community Food Coalition) is here as well of course Ella’s Outreach in Camargo.”

Atkins said M&M volunteers have gotten a lot of personal satisfaction from serving those in need. Most people don’t understand the breadth of the need in the community until they volunteer, he said.
That need is also greater this year with the recent announcement that Operation Happiness will not be taking place this year. The annual project normally provides about 300 food baskets to families in need each holiday season.

M&M asks that you make any donations to the food coalition, located at 515 Maysville Road. It is open Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9-10 a.m. and 4:30-5:30 p.m.

Several schools are also currently conducting food drives. You can check with your school to see how to contribute.

There will be a reception honoring the M&M board members and volunteers 4:30-6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 28, at Spoonful of Sugar on East Main Street.