As my first community service event, I chose to go to CODI’s food pantry. CODI is the acronym for “Career Opportunity Development, Inc.” I learned about this group through the Stockton Annual Day of Service on September 6th. There were so many different organizations to choose from; the Event Room was overwhelming! After browsing around the room for a while, the CODI sign caught my eye. I asked what it was about and immediately knew that this was the service project I wanted to spend the day doing.
When my service group arrived at the food pantry, a energetic woman welcomed us. It was just a little building that had a good sized food pantry, a main room, and a huge cafeteria/warehouse space with cafeteria tables set up. She separated us into two groups, and one group went into the main room. This group worked on putting two cups of oats into plastic baggies followed by two cups of rice into separate plastic baggies. The other group, my group, got right to work organizing the food pantry. This was a much bigger job than we originally thought.
Although the room wasn’t necessarily big, there were shelves and shelves of food items lining the walls. They were organized by type of food (soup, peanut butter, cereal, etc.), but the dates of them were all mixed up. Our job was to take inventory of all the items in our designated zone/wall and throw away the ones that were expired over a year. Then, we would reorganize the food items that were still good with the one that has the earliest expiration date at the front. As part of the reorganization process, we were also told to look on each individual can or box for the expiration date and circle it. For the cases of items, we circled the expiration date of the contents as well as the quantity in each box. This made it easier for the employees to deliver food to people who came to collect all sorts of consumables. The items without an expiration date were put on the center table into the “distribute first” box.
After about 4 hours of organizing the food pantry, we all took a break for lunch then came back together and helped the people who were still bagging oats and rice. This turned out to be the most tedious part of our volunteer service. There seemed to be never ending bags of oats and cereal (when the rice was gone we moved on to big boxes of Cheerios)! It turns out that the reason for this was because it made distribution to those who receive items from this food pantry easier. Two cups of rice was a better serving size than a whole pound. When we finally threw away the last bulk box of Cheerios and sealed the last two cups in a plastic baggie, we had done our part.
When we were finished, we had a bit of extra time until our bus came and we spent that time talking to the woman who was with us, organizing. She was so grateful that we helped so much; it was worth all the sealing, bagging and reorganizing to hear what a help we had been to her. In fact, she would have to have done all this work that eight people did virtually by herself. It was so rewarding to know that we had helped hungry people, indirectly. Because of all our organizing CODI would be able to efficiently distribute food items to people that need it most.
I had the opportunity to talk to her one-on-one for a short time and she kept telling me how thankful she was to us. Also, I learned that people without jobs in need of a little extra money actually came to the building and would do odd jobs like sweeping and cleaning for a profit. It turns out that this food pantry helps people in need in more ways than just providing sustenance! I actually didn’t much mind the organizing of the pantry and talked to her about setting up a sort of collection box for CODI on campus. That would make this experience more than just a one-time event and I would have the chance to work more with this organization.