Toni Yates reports on the couple offering good to those in need during the pandemic.
The soup kitchen, supported by Franciscan Charities, would feed hundreds of families in the dining hall until COVID forced the space to shut down - but it did not stop the outreach. It s changed in a dramatic way in that now there are more working poor, people who have lost their jobs, who have not been unemployed before but are now either unemployed or underemployed, Miller said.
Volunteers continue to show up because they could not leave their clients hungry. The chef kept cooking and meals were handed out outside - with precautions in place.
The pandemic forced NJ soup kitchens to close. This scrappy charity found a workaround.
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As times get even tougher for the residents of the West and Central wards of Newark, a scrappy volunteer group that supplies them with food and social services just works harder.
Forced to close its soup kitchen when COVID hit in March, Franciscan Charities, which operates out of St. Ann s Catholic Church on Sixth Street, pivoted outdoors, distributing more than 55,000 meals from the back of a van between March and November, plus other essentials like coats, diapers and baby formula.
For its efforts, the nonprofit recently received recognition from the Obama Foundation as a pandemic Story of Hope. Calling the Newark charity small but mighty, the foundation website and Twitter feed featured a photo of masked and gloved volunteers in winter hats distributing food outside the church.
Obama Foundation honors NJ charity that continued during pandemic
A New Jersey charity that kept plugging away despite the pandemic has received national recognition. According to NorthJersey.com, the Franciscan Charities in Newark refused to give up when COVID forced them to shut down their soup kitchen; the kitchen had been serving hundreds of people a day who now might not have access to any food.
Since the needy could no longer come to them, the charity came to the community, preparing the food off-site and filling bags with meals to be distributed to the people who needed them. They now provide the meals from outside their home base at St. Ann’s Church on South 6th Street in Newark. For this effort, the Franciscan Charities was honored by the Obama Foundation as a “Story of Hope.”