EMERGENCY FOOD DRIVE:

In October 2025, several CUMC members expressed concern about the adverse effects of the prolonged federal government shutdown and the reduction of snap benefits. An announcement was made in the weekly newsletter and from the pulpit in late October/early November that an organizational meeting would be held on Sunday 11/3/25 to discuss a possible food drive.

At the initial organizational meeting, 24 persons attended plus Dr. Deb and Dr Joey. The group discussed how a food drive would be handled and determined we would serve as the source of obtaining food but would not serve as a distribution center. Beth & Meade Moore offered to help lead the mission.

The next day Nov 4, 2025 another meeting at CUMC was held where additional persons attended, some of which were non-members. 15 people attended. At this meeting, specific volunteer opportunities were established with sign up sheets.

We worked with Alan Sweet and Erin to prepare a marketing announcement to be placed in church newsletter and on church signage, as well as suitable for the community. Some of the volunteers, led by Susan King, organized a list of Collierville area churches so that they could be contacted and made aware of our Food Drive. Ultimately, we received a generous donation of $3000 from St Andrews Episcopal church. Grace Hill church also brought a large amount of canned goods.

Posters announcing the Food Drive were placed around the Collierville community.

We established a drop off area at Entrance 4 and placed signage on the church property to direct folks to that site. Our group wanted the food to be delivered to persons who lived near by, and we learned the only local distribution centers were the City of Collierville Food Pantry or Incarnation Church. Since Incarnation provided more distribution dates and did not discriminate between Shelby vs Fayette County residency, we selected Incarnation as the recipient of the donated food.

The response received from the community, both in donated goods as well as monetary donations, was fantastic. Ed King headed up deliveries of the non-perishable goods from the CUMC site to Incarnation. In total he made 6 deliveries, and the total food dropped off and then taken to Incarnation was close to 8500 pounds!! The man hours spent by Ed and those who helped him was 9 hours.

We received almost $7700 in monetary donations so a group of volunteers handled purchasing food at Sam’s Club and then taking it to Incarnation. This involved 7 trips involving 43 total hours. We estimated these shopping trips resulted in a total of 17,000 pounds of food delivered.

In summary, during the months of November and December, we were making deliveries of food almost twice a week. This was a tremendous help to Incarnation so they could devote their resources in distributing the food instead of purchasing. It was a great partnership as we coordinated our deliveries with them and were able to utilize their volunteers when we dropped off food which made the process operate more smoothly.

Not only did we have the satisfaction of feeding several hundred people each week, we enjoyed camaraderie with others during our shopping expeditions and drop offs.

It was a very successful and rewarding project and think everyone who participated felt it was extremely worthwhile.